Workers, Strikes, and Pogroms: The Donbass-Dnepr Bend in Late Imperial Russia, 1870-1905 [Course Book ed.] 9781400862894

Table of contents :
Contents
Illustrations
Tables
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
Introduction
PART ONE: THE WORKING-CLASS
1. The Industrial Boom: 1870-1900
2. The Labor Force
3. Working-Class Daily Life
PART TWO: THE LABOR AND REVOLUTIONARY MOVEMENTS
4. Late-Nineteenth-Century Unrest
5. The Rise of Political Radicalism
6. The Revolutionary Surge: 1903 to October 1905
7. The Reactionary Backlash: 1903 to October 1905
8. The Bid for Power: December 1905
Conclusion
Selected Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

WORKERS, STRIKES, AND POGROMS

WORKERS, STRIKES, AND POGROMS THE DONBASS-DNEPR BEND IN LATE IMPERIAL RUSSIA, 1870-1905

Charters Wynn

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

PRINCETON, NEW JERSEY

Copyright © 1992 by Princeton University Press Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540 In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, Oxford All Rights Reserved

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publicatton Data Wynn, Charters, 1953Workers, strikes, and pogroms : the Donbass-Dnepr Bend in late imperial Russia, 1870-1905 / Charters Wynn. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-691-03152-5 1. Labor movements—Donets Basin (Ukraine and R.S.F.S.R.)—History 2. Working class—Donets Basin (Ukraine and R.S.F.S.R.)—History. 3. Radicalism—Donets Basin (Ukraine and R.S.F.S.R.)—History. 4. Donets Basin (Ukraine and R.S.F.S.R.)—Industries—History. 5. Donets Basin (Ukraine and R.S.F.S.R.)—Ethnic relations. 6. Soviet Union—History—Revolution of 1905. I. Title. HD8529. D66W96 1992 322'.2'0947716—dc20 91-30496 This book has been composed in Linotron GaMiard Princeton University Press books are printed on acid-free paper, and meet the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources Printed in the United States of America 1 0 9

8

7

6

5

4

3

2

1

To Joan

Contents

List of Illustrations

ix

List of Tables

xi

Acknowledgments

xiii

Abbreviations

xv

Introduction

3

PART ONE: THE WORKING-CLASS MILIEU

13

1. The Industrial Boom: 1870-1900

15

2. The Labor Force

37

3. Working-Class Daily Life

67

PART TWO: THE LABOR AND REVOLUTIONARY MOVEMENTS

95

4. Late-Nineteenth-Century Unrest

97

5. The Rise of Political Radicalism

131

6. The Revolutionary Surge: 1903 to October 1905

165

7. The Reactionary Backlash: 1903 to Oaober 1905

198

8. The Bid for Power: December 1905

111

Conclusion

255

Selected Bibliography

269

Index

283

Illustrations

Maps: European Russia The Donbass—Dnepr Bend Industrial Region

12 12

Following page 130: 1. The central avenue of Makeevka. (.Istoriia ekaterinoslavskoi sotsial-demokraticbeskm organizatsii, 1889-1903) 2. The New Russia Company's steel mill in Iuzovka (Istoriia ekaterinoslavskoi sotsial-demokraticbeskoi organizatsii, 1889-1903) 3. A group of coal hewers posing in front of a mine shaft (Iu. Iu. Kondurov, ed., Istoriia Ukrainskoi SSR, vol. 5 [Kiev, 1963]) 4. A "sled man" hauling coal in a mine (Kondurov, Istoriia Ukrainskoi SSR) 5. Loading coal by hand into railroad wagons at the Gorsko-Ivanovskii mine (Kondurov, Istoriia Ukrainskoi SSR) 6. Unloading coal for the blast furnaces at the New Russia Company's steel mill (Kondurov, Istoriia Ukrainskoi SSR) 7. Briansk rolling mill workers and management (The Foss Collection, Hoover Institution Archives) 8. A crew of pattern-makers posing with shop foremen and managers at the Briansk steel mill (The Foss Collection, Hoover Institution Archives) 9. Ekaterinoslav worker-intelligent*, active in Briansk steel mill Social Democratic kruzhki during the 1890s (Istoriia ekaterinoslavskoi sotsial-demokraticheskoi or­ ganizatsii, 1889-1903) 10. A reunion of former Bolshevik members of the Ekaterinoslav Social Demo­ cratic party (Istoriia ekaterinoslavskoi sotsial-iUmokraticheskoi organizatsii, 18891903) 11. Victims of 1905 pogroms in Ekaterinoslav (Archives of the YTVO Institute for Jewish Research)

Tables

1. 2. 3. 4.

Coal Prcxluction in the Donets Basin, 1870-1900 Iron Production in the Krivoi Rog, 1885—1900 Provincial Crime Rates, 1898-1906 Number of Strikes and Riots in Ekaterinoslav Province, 1870-1899

18 19 90 100

Acknowledgments

I WANT to express my gratitude to all those who made this book possible, indirectly or directly, beginning with my parents and friends, colleagues and teachers—especially Terence Emmons, my dissertation adviser at Stan­ ford. Reginald Zelnik helpfully commented on my first formulation of this topic. More recendy, the manuscript benefited from a close reading by Gerald Surh, who offered useful suggestions and criticisms. My thanks, too, to Princeton University Press's readers and editors for their valuable advice and corrections. My brother, Christopher Wynn, generously some­ how found the time to make the maps while meeting the demands of the commercial art world. It is also a pleasure to record my indebtedness to the International Re­ search and Exchanges Board for giving me the opportunity to spend a year in Soviet archives and libraries. This study would not have been possible without that support and without the cooperation of the archivists and librarians of the Central State Archive of the October Revolution in Mos­ cow, the Central State Historical Archives in Leningrad and Kiev, the Lenin Library in Moscow, and the library of the Academy of Sciences in Leningrad. Back home, the rich collection of the library of the Hoover Institution was also especially valuable. I am indebted to the librarians there, as well as to those at the Stanford University Library, the New York Public Library, and the Bund Archive of the Jewish Labor Movement. This work also benefited from the libraries and interlibrary-loan staffs of Lafayette College, the University of Houston at Clear Lake, Rice Univer­ sity, and the University of Texas at Austin. Above all I want to thank my wife and colleague, Joan Neuberger, to whom this book is dedicated, for helping me through moments of dis­ couragement and for taking time away from her own work to offer truly innumerable stylistic and substantive suggestions on successive drafts of this work, from the dissertation to the final manuscript. Whatever virtues this book has owe much to her.

Abbreviations

The following abbreviations have been used in the footnotes for archival citations: TsGAOR TsGIA TsGIA USSR

f. op. d. ch.

DP OO

M. Iu.

Tsentral'nyi gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Oktiabr5Skoi revoliutsii (Central State Archive of the Oaober Revolu­ tion) Tsentral'nyi gosudarstvennyi istoricheskii arkhiv (Central State Historical Archive) Tsentral'nyi gosudarstvennyi istoricheskii arkhiv Ukrainskoi SSR (Central State Historical Archive of the Ukrainian SSR) fond (collection or category) opis' (inventory or list) delo (dossier or file)

Chastj (part)

Departament politsii, Osobyi otdel (Department of Po­ lice, Special Section) Ministerstvo iustitsii (Ministry of Justice)

References to listy use p. and pp. instead of /. and U., and vol. is used for the Russian torn.

WORKERS, STRIKES, AND POGROMS

Introduction

NOWHERE in late imperial Russia did the working class grow more dra­ matically than in the Donbass-Dnepr Bend industrial region. Because local Ukrainians proved reluctant to enter the labor force, what began as a trickle in the 1870s became a flood in the 1890s as tens of thousands of peasant migrants from the villages of European Russia, along with thousands of Jews from the towns of the northwestern Pale of Settlement, annually poured into this booming corner of the Russian empire. Seeking the relatively high wages offered in the Donbass-Dnepr Bend, they came south to work in the mines, steel mills, and artisanal workshops just open­ ing there. They entered a rough world. The industrial boomtowns offered few amenities and quickly developed a well-deserved reputation as bleak and violent frontier towns. The predominantly young, male population was renowned for drinking and fighting. Workers in the Donbass-Dnepr Bend also became known for their ex­ ceptionally militant and violent labor movement. To understand how these workers collectively expressed their discontent is the chief concern of this study. It is my hope that an analysis of the labor movement in what was fast becoming Russia's industrial heartland will contribute to a more real­ istic conception of the dynamics of Russian labor unrest. This history of the Donbass-Dnepr Bend working class and labor move­ ment addresses fundamental historiographic questions about Russian workers' "consciousness" and the role of workers in the 1905 Revolution. It examines whether the mass of workers shared the aspirations of the rad­ icals intent on organizing them, and whether the revolutionary movement could overcome the tensions within the working class that were rooted in differences in workers' regional origins and, more important, in ethnic dif­ ferences between industrial workers and artisans. It approaches from a new perspective the problem Laura Engelstein raised in her study of the 1905 Revolution in Moscow: "The working class was not a passive element in the revolutionary upheaval. It is clear that educated political leaders were not free to manipulate the masses in whatever direction they desired. It is difficult, however, to determine the degree to which socialist ideology cor­ responded to the workers' actual motives and desires."1 As in Moscow, revolutionary leaders in the Donbass-Dnepr Bend faced serious problems trying to channel working-class discontent. But in the Donbass-Dnepr 1 Laura Engclstcin, Moscow, 1905: Working-Class Organization and Political Conflia (Stan­ ford, 1982), p. 2.

4

INTRODUCTION

Bend, at least, it was not just workers' commitment to socialist or any other political ideology, but workers' class consciousness—their sense of solidar­ ity with other workers—that would be at issue. Labor historians commonly speak of Russian workers' "mixed con­ sciousness." To a far greater extent than their Western European counter­ parts during the comparable stage of industrialization, Russian workers did not sever their peasant ties. Because of their failure to conform to con­ ventional Marxist notions of proletarianization, their consciousness is thought to have retained both peasant and proletarian characteristics.2 In the Donbass-Dnepr Bend, in addition to the worker-peasant mixed con­ sciousness, to which historians have devoted considerable attention, worker participation in both revolutionary and Teacrionanr mass actions reveals that another sort of mixed consciousness existed in the Russian working class—one that historians have overlooked. Workers in the Donbass-Dnepr Bend proved to be among the most militant in Russia. During the 1905 Revolution, the "dress rehearsal" for 1917, Russian workers were instrumental in forcing Tsar Nicholas Π to grant the people a constitution, civil rights, and a parliament, bringing to an end almost three hundred years of unlimited autocratic rule. During 1905, Donbass-Dnepr Bend workers repeatedly responded en masse to revolutionary appeals to strike and demonstrate, which often led to bloody confrontations with soldiers and Cossacks. In these mass actions, workers displayed a unity cutting across the ethnic and other lines that ordinarily divided workers in the Donbass-Dnepr Bend. At the same time, however, industrial workers in this region also participated en masse in some of the most devastating pogroms in prerevolutionary Russia. In many cases, workers who participated in radical strike activity with the support and praise of radical party intelligenty also engaged in the brutal, destructive violence of pogroms. Radical activists' attempts to constrain workers' eth­ nic violence repeatedly proved futile. Thus, although a politicallv active, radical working-class movement had developed in the Donbass-Dnepr Bend by 1905, the upsurge in the revolutionary movement did not dis­ place reactionary elements in the working class. Just as movement from the village to the Donbass-Dnepr Bend was not a one-way trip—workers con­ tinually moved back and forth between village and factors' or mine—the radicalization of workers in the late nineteenth and earlv twentieth centu­ ries was not a linear process. With the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 in view, labor historians have been preoccupied with explaining the radicalization of the Russian labor 2 On the peasant character of the Russian working class, see Robert Eugene Johnson, Peas­ ant and Proletarian. The WoHang Class of'Moscow tn the Late Ntneteettth Century (New Bruns­ wick, N.J., 1979); and Theodore Von Laue, "Russian Labor between Field and Factor.·," Calrfomta Slavic Studies 3 (1964): 33—66.

INTRODUCTION

5

movement. When examining labor unrest, Russian labor historiography in both the Soviet Union and the West has concentrated on the role of the labor elite and their intelligentsia organizers to explain the labor move­ ment's emergence and progress from what are viewed as primitive forms of protest—isolated, peasantlike outbursts of violence—to more coordi­ nated, political mass actions. Three pathbreaking studies by Richard Pipes, Allan Wildman, and Reginald Zelnik have explored the radicalization and complex mentality of Russian workers at the turn of the twentieth century, primarily through the experiences of the worker-intelligent and through the relations between such extraordinary workers and the intelligentsia rev­ olutionary leadership.3 During the boom in labor historiography in the last decade or so, there has been a growing recognition, building upon work by Leopold Haimson, of the need to explore the subgroups that consti­ tuted the Russian working class and to refute Soviet attempts to explain workers' militance as the result of a linear proletarianization and maturing of the working class.4 Even so, Western labor historians continue to con­ centrate primarily on the most politically "conscious" (soznateVnye) and ac­ tive stratum of the working class. There is no denying the importance of such workers. A core of workers 3 Richard Pipes, Social Democracy and the St. PetersburgLaborMovement, 1885-1897 (Cam­ bridge, Mass., 1963); Allan K. Wildman, The Making of a Workers' Revolution: Russian Social Democracy, 1891-1903 (Chicago, 1967); Reginald E. Zelnik, "Russian Bebels: An Introduc­ tion to the Memoirs of Semen Kanatchikov and Matvei Fisher," parts 1, 2, Russian Rcvtetv 35, nos. 3,4 (1976): 249-289,417-447. 4 Leopold Haimson, "The Problem of Social Stability in Urban Russia, 1905—1917," parts 1,2 Slavic Review 23, no. 4 (1964): 619-642; 24, no. 1 (1965): 1-22. Although the authors of recent valuable studies on the 1905 and 1917 revolutions "from below" have concentrated on the skilled workers in the metal and machine trades and textile industry, they also examine issues connected to the stratification of the labor force. See Gerald Dennis Surh, 1905 in St. Petersburg: Labor, Society, and Revolution (Stanford, 1989); Engelstein, Moscow, 1905; Diane Koenker, Moscow Workers and the 1917 Revolution (Princeton, 1981); David Mandel, The Petrograd Workers and the Fall of the Old Regime (London, 1983) and The Petrograd Workers and the Soviet Seizure of Power (London, 1984); and S. A. Smith, Red Petrograd: Revolution in the Factories, 1917-1918 (Cambridge, England, 1983). See also Heather Hogan, "Industrial Rationalization and the Roots of Labor Militance in the St. Petersburg Metalworking Indus­ try, 1901-1914," Russian Review 42, no. 2 (1983): 163—190; and Tim McDamel, Autocracy, Capitalism, and Revolution in Russta (Berkeley, 1988). In Roots of Rebellion: Workers' Politics and Organizations in St. Petersburg and Moscow, 1900-1914 (Berkeley, 1983), VictoriaBonnell shows that along with the more educated, skilled workers in metal industries, the skilled artisans in small workshops were among the most active and radical workers in St. Petersburg and Moscow. Henry Reichman highlighted the radicalizing role of the skilled metalworkers in the railroad workshops in his study Ratlwaymen and Revolution: Russia, 1905 (Berkeley, 1987). On railroad workers, see also William G. Rosenberg, "The Democratization of Rus­ sia's Railroads in 1917,"AmericanHistortcalReview 86, no. 5 (1981): 983—1008. On women workers, see Rose L. Glickman, Russian Faaory Women: Workplace and Society, 1880-1914 (Berkeley, 1984).

6

INTRODUCTION

from among the skilled elite in Donbass-Dnepr Bend steel mills and rail­ road and artisanal workshops played a leading role in the radicalization of the labor movement in the Donbass-Dnepr Bend, just as they did in the capitals. Many Donbass-Dnepr Bend workers selflessly sacrificed much in the struggle to improve working-class conditions and overthrow the au­ tocracy. Yet the focus on the labor elite that was active in radical party politics and willing to risk imprisonment to bring about social and eco­ nomic change has led historians to neglect the large number of workers who did not live up to the heroic image that has gained prominence in the literature on Russian labor. As was generally the case throughout industrial Russia, in the DonbassDnepr Bend's giant steel mills, which supplied a large percentage of the region's radical working-class activists, politically "conscious" workers were surrounded by a sea of what skilled workers and radical organizers referred to as "benighted" (temnye) or "backward" (otstalye) workers. The miners in the region were almost uniformly so described. Most skilled workers felt condescension toward this mass of their fellow workers, es­ pecially toward those illiterates fresh from the countryside. In their daily lives, most skilled workers joined their employers and foremen in contin­ ually subjecting unskilled workers to ridicule. Even those skilled workers who espoused socialist ideas and recognized that radical change was im­ possible without class solidarity shared these attitudes, though less openly. It was not just the day laborers doing the most menial, manual jobs whom skilled workers viewed with scorn; they lumped the semiskilled together with the mass of the unskilled. Skilled workers quite accurately did not locate semiskilled workers halfway between the most and least skilled workers. A vast gulf separated those workers whose skills had been ac­ quired in a few weeks or months from those who had undergone years of apprenticeship. For their part, unskilled workers both envied the privileges and prestige skilled workers enjoyed and resented their contempt. Concentration on the tiny percentage of workers active in revolutionary politics and working-class organizations has meant that our understanding of the Russian revolutionary process still lacks an appreciation of the role played by the mass of unskilled laborers and semiskilled workers in that process. Everyone who has studied the Russian working class agrees that individuals from the mass of workers rarely entered the ranks of the revo­ lutionary parties or represented their enterprise or industry in the soviets that emerged in October 1905. Yet while unskilled workers are less impor­ tant as individual leaders, and less accessible to the historian, there is no denying their importance to the revolutionary movement. Their support in general strikes is what gave the revolutionary movement its power dur­ ing 1905. It is not enough, however, to study the economic, social, and political

INTRODUCTION

7

forces that could unite the working class in collective action. Shared work­ place pressures, a torrent of revolutionary propaganda, and the sense of power that mass actions produced could bridge the differences separating workers. But at the same time, other concerns—as well as the frustrations mass actions produced—could blow these fragile bridges asunder. Work­ ers' intolerance and their proclivity for violence coexisted with hopes for economic improvement and social leveling. This should not be surprising. Not unlike their class enemies, Donbass-Dnepr Bend workers exhibited a mix of class and ethnic or regional identities.5 The rapid industrialization of the Donbass-Dnepr Bend brought together traditionally antagonistic groups, creating intraclass stresses that ran along regional and ethnic lines. These regional differences within the industrial labor force in the Don­ bass-Dnepr Bend—and, more important, ethnic differences between in­ dustrial workers and artisans—proved to be a source of violent intraclass conflict. By examining the role of young, unskilled workers in pogroms, this study presents a long-needed portrait of the "low consciousness" and eth­ nic rivalries that existed within the Russian working class alongside sup­ port for revolutionary mass actions.6 During the 1905 Revolution, in the Donbass-Dnepr Bend, any semblances of class consciousness or solidarity repeatedly disappeared in the face of regional and ethnic animosities. Ag­ gravated by its frustration with the outcome of mass actions, the predominandy Great Russian and Ukrainian industrial work force again and again engaged in reactionary as well as radical mass actions. As my research into Donbass-Dnepr Bend working-class conditions and radicalism pro­ gressed, it became increasingly clear that worker anti-Semitism played a major role in the evolution of the labor movement in the Donbass-Dnepr Bend and that a thorough examination of this issue is crucial to a proper understanding of the Russian labor movement and the 1905 Revolution. 5 It is interesting to note that in the recently reemergent labor movement in the Soviet Union, workers have expressed a strong sense of industry identity. During the general strike in the Donets Basin in the summer of 1989, a reporter for the New York Times stated that "a major anxiety for the Kremlin during the coal strike was the possibility that with living con­ ditions such a source of general dissatisfaction, the miners'strike might easily spread to related industries . . . [but] amid the general enthusiasm for change, the mill workers strongly indi­ cated that they do not equate themselves with the coal miners, contrary perhaps, to some outsiders' notion of worker solidarity" (New York Times, July 27, 1989, p. 6). 6 A start in this direction was made by Daniel R. Brower in "Labor Violence in Russia in the Late Nineteenth Century," Slavic Review 41, no. 3 (1982): 417—453. See also William G. Rosenberg and Diane P. Koenker, "The Limits of Formal Protest: Worker Activism and So­ cial Polarization in Petrograd and Moscow, March to October, 1917," American Historical Repine 92, no. 2 (1987): 296-326; Haimson, "Social Stability"; and Joan Neuberger, "Crime and Culture: Hooliganism in St. Petersburg, 1900-1914" (Ph.D. diss., Stanford University, 1985), chap. 2.

8

INTRODUCTION

What might be called the ruffian element in the Russian labor movement— the mass of especially violent, less ideologically oriented workers—was willing to go to the streets in organized mass actions against its economic enemies. These workers were also willing to unleash humanity's lowest passions in ferocious violence against those they considered their ethnic enemies, primarily Jews.7 In doing so, they showed a distinct lack of re­ spect for the authority of the revolutionary parties trying to lead the working-class movement. The emphasis here on the link that existed between revolutionary and reactionary forms of mass action is not intended to suggest a return to the mob theories of violence in revolution. Such interpretations failed to sub­ ject the working class to close study and instead focused on political elites and their manipulation of the supposedly mindless crowd. This book fol­ lows the lead of studies of the crowd in early industrial Europe or America in recognizing that a rioting mass of workers, even when drunk and in a fit of passion, cannot be dismissed as an irrational mob blinded by drink and rage. Such workers chose to lash out in violence in a selective manner and as a means for pursuing particular ends, however abhorrent or wrongheaded we may think they were. The social histories of Russian labor pub­ lished beginning in the 1960s have provided an important corrective to mob theories by demonstrating the workers' sense of separateness and op­ pression. This study will show the way in which those qualities were turned to violence and destruction in the service of revolutionary and re­ actionary ends.8 7 The traditional historical treatment of pogroms shared the view of many contemporaries that the tsarist government conspired with right-wing political groups to organize pogroms to divert popular discontent away from the government. See, for example, Simon Dubnov, TheHistoryoftheJews in Russia and Poland, trans. I. Friedlaender (Philadelphia, 1916-1920), vol. 4. Recendy, scholars have reexamined pogroms and concluded that while the authorities' anti-Semitic policies indirectly encouraged pogroms, there is no evidence to substantiate the theory of a government plot (Shlomo Lambroza, 'The Pogrom Movement in Tsarist Russia, 1903—1906" [Ph.D. diss., Rutgers University, 1981]; Hans Rogger,Jewish Policies and RjghtWing Politics in Imperial Russia [Berkeley, 1986]; I. Michael Aronson, "Geographical and Socioeconomic Factors in the 1881 Anti-Jewish Pogroms in Russia," Russian Review 39, no. 1 [1980]: 18-31). The conspiracy theory was fueled by the willingness of police and troops to stand aside during pogroms, or by the fact that individuals from their ranks sometimes did join the pogromists. But even though the authorities often did litde to stop pogroms, gov­ ernment officials were far too concerned with suppressing political discontent to run the risks of unleashing any form of mass unrest. The government opposed all mass violence, including pogroms. For an examination of the workers' role in the October 1905 pogrom in Odessa, see Robert Weinberg, "Workers, Pogroms, and the 1905 Revolution in Odessa," Russian Review 46, no. 1 (1987). 8 As will become clear, the political consciousness of the mass of workers was neither rev­ olutionary nor reactionary in any well-developed sense. But the significance of that distinction is dubious, since workers repeatedly engaged in revolutionary and reactionary mass actions. The emphasis on reactionary working-class actions in this study is not meant to deemphasize

INTRODUCTION

9

The regional focus of this study helps redress another critical imbalance in Russian labor historiography. Studies of the Russian labor and revolu­ tionary movements have been overwhelmingly oriented toward the two capitals, St. Petersburg and Moscow.9 We have had few non-Soviet re­ gional labor histories.10 The concentration on the capitals is understand­ able, given the centralization of the Russian empire and the superiority of sources for the capitals; but regional studies are long overdue. The ethnic diversity of the empire and the uneven development of Russia's labor force and revolutionary movement demand regional studies so that historical syntheses can accurately portray regional differences. The Donbass-Dnepr Bend is an excellent place to examine the Russian labor movement outside the capitals. Not only were industrial develop­ ment and urbanization extremely rapid, intensifying problems found in other regions, but the Donbass-Dnepr Bend region is located almost en­ tirely within the Pale of Setdement, the part of the Russian empire to which Jews were legally confined. Because its workers and the environment in which they lived and worked were ethnically and regionally mixed, the Donbass-Dnepr Bend provides insight into the crucial importance of eth­ nic tensions within the working class. It seems likely that the sort of mixed consciousness displayed by the mass of workers in the Donbass-Dnepr Bend, and the problems it posed for revolutionary leaders, existed else­ where in the empire (if usually in more muted forms) but has been over­ looked. In addition, the common assumption that the provincial industrial centers merely followed the lead of the capitals in the 1905 Revolution, reproducing on a smaller and less militant scale events in St. Petersburg and Moscow, needs to be revised. This study demonstrates that one of the most combative workers' movements in Russia was concentrated in the radical actions; that it seems to is a reflection of the size of the historiographic gap this study is trying to fill. 9 In addition to the works cited above, see Reginald E. Zelnik, Labor and Society in Tsarist Russia: TheFaaory Workers of St. Petersburg, 1855-1870 (Stanford, 1971). 10 Theodore H. Friedgut5S Iuzovka and Revolution, vol. 1, Life and Work in Russia's Donbass, 1869-1924 (Princeton, 1989) was published as I was completing the final draft of this book, a revision of my 1987 Stanford University Ph.D. dissertation, "Russian Labor in Revolution and Reaction: The Donbass Working Class, 1870-1905." See also Susan Purves McCaffray, "The New Work and the Old Regime: Workers, Managers, and the State in the Coal and Steel Industry of Ekaterinoslav Province, 1905-1914" (Ph.D. diss., Duke University, 1983); Robert Weinberg, "Worker Organizations and Politics in the Revolution of 1905 in Odessa" (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1985) and "Social Democracy and Workers in Odessa: Ethnic and Political Considerations," Carl Beck Papers in Russian and EastEuropean Studies, no. 504 (1986); and selections in Michael F. Hamm, ed., The City in Late Imperial Russia (Bloomington, Ind., 1986). The regional studies of 1917 include Donald J. Raleigh, Revolution on the Volga: 1917 in Saratov (Ithaca, N.Y., 1986); and Ronald Grigor Suny, The Baku Commune, 1917-1918: Class and Nationality in the Russian Revolution (Princeton, 1972).

10

INTRODUCTION

Donbass-Dnepr Bend and was the product of a combination of condi­ tions—some nationwide, some unique to the region. The major primary sources for this study of the Donbass-Dnepr Bend working class and the motivations of the largely anonymous individuals who participated in the mass movement were government documents, the revolutionary press and local legal press, reports of the local industrialists' association, health investigations, and memoirs of radical activists. Gov­ ernment documents that proved useful include a wide variety of official reports, such as police investigations of labor unrest and of revolutionary activity, communiques sent by various local authorities to the central gov­ ernment describing working-class conditions and events, reports of the fac­ tory inspectorate, and lengthy indictments from the trials of those arrested in the major labor disturbances, as well as the intercepted personal letters preserved in the police archives.11 Also especially useful were correspon­ dent reports written by members of the numerous radical parties in the Donbass-Dnepr Bend that were published in these parties' national and regional organs. While many of these reports present exaggerated or con­ tradictory accounts, they nonetheless provide a wealth of detail. Most im­ portant, the correspondents' occasional frankness about their views of Donbass-Dnepr Bend workers and their hopes and fears concerning the region's revolutionary movement were invaluable. Still another perspective was provided by the reports from the annual congresses of the Association of Southern Coal and Steel Producers and by reports in the Association's newspaper, which present the views of management. Local legal newspa­ pers, particularly Pridneprovskii krai ('TheDnepr Territory) and VestnikIuga ('The Southern Herald), supplemented and balanced the government, party, and industry accounts of the working-class and mass actions by providing accounts somewhat less partisan than those in the other sources. A large number of memoirs by Social Democratic veterans of the revolutionary movements in the Donbass-Dnepr Bend were published during the early 1920s and are relatively free of the ideological straitjacket that makes later memoirs of little value. These early memoirs often have an immediacy lack­ ing in the other sources. In addition to these primary sources, the most useful secondary sources also come from the early 1920s, in the form of early histories of the Donbass-Dnepr Bend labor movement. Many of 11 While the tsarist government's determination to uproot seditious activities—a determi­ nation so fully documented in the archives—has obvious advantages for the historian, official reports must be read with a close eye for police self-interest and possible malfeasance, as revelations concerning EkaterinoSlaviS police chief, Rittmeister Krementskii, dramatically il­ lustrate. Krementskii had gready impressed his superiors in the capital with his vigilance and efficiency by uncovering three or four underground presses in Ekaterinoslav annually. Krementskii's reputation and rise up the career ladder, as well as the perception of the strength of the revolutionary movement, suffered a sudden reversal, however, when it was learned that Krementskii had set up the presses himself (Abraham Ascher, The Revolution of1905: Russia in Disarray [Stanford, 1988], pp. 13-14).

INTRODUCTION

11

these histories were, significantly, written by former party activists. Later Soviet studies of the Donbass-Dnepr Bend labor movement completely ignore the movement's reactionary side.

This study is divided into two parts. The first three chapters provide the background necessary to understand the discontent of the newly created labor force. The history of the Donbass-Dnepr Bend region's economic development is treated in chapter 1, the composition of the working class in chapter 2, and workers' daily life in chapter 3. Knowledge of the work­ ing-class milieu, including sources of conflict as well as sources of solidar­ ity, is essential for understanding the mentality and actions of DonbassDnepr Bend workers. How workers acted on ordinary days provides in­ sight into why workers acted as they did on days of mass ferment. The remaining five chapters examine the history of the Donbass-Dnepr Bend labor and revolutionary movements from the 1870s to December 1905. Chapter 4 is devoted to the late nineteenth century and examines the first mass actions to appear in the region and the first examples of DonbassDnepr Bend workers' mixed consciousness. Revolutionary agitation was an important factor in explaining workers' roles in revolution and reaction and is examined in chapter 5. Chapters 6 and 7 treat the revolutionary upsurge from 1903 through Ortober 1905. Chapter 6 discusses radical working-class activity and establishes the extraordinary militance of the re­ gion's workers. Chapter 7 looks at reactionary and pogromist mass actions during the same period and demonstrates the remarkable complexity of the labor movement. Revolution and reaction came together again in the af­ termath of October 1905, leading up to and significantly shaping the De­ cember insurrection examined in Chapter 8. One final introductory note is necessary. I chose to call the region this study focuses on the Donbass-Dnepr Bend, even though convention and a desire for conciseness have permitted historians and contemporaries to use Donbass as a substitute for the more accurate, but I hope not impossibly cumbersome, term I use here. The Donbass, short for the Donets Basin, includes only the lower valley of the Donets River, where the region's coal­ field is located. The Donbass-Dnepr Bend encompasses the entire region that participated in the industrial boom that transformed the iron- and coal-mining areas of the eastern Ukraine into an economic entity that tran­ scended administrative boundaries. The Donbass-Dnepr Bend labor movement—which involved the coal miners of the Donets Basin, the ironore miners of the Krivoi Rog, and the steelworkers, railroad workers, and artisans of the large and small steel towns scattered along the region's rail­ road lines and rivers—extended beyond Ekaterinoslav province into part of the Don Cossack Territory.

Areas with greatest influx of workers from other regions Jewish Pale of

The Donbass—Dnepr Bend Industrial Region

Settlement

k- Railroad

Lines

Part One THE WORKING-CLASS MILIEU

1 The Industrial Boom:

1870-1900

I worked at a factory owned by Germans, at coal pits owned by a Frenchman, and at a chemical plant owned by Belgians. There fin the Donbass-Dnepr Bend] I discovered something about capitalists. They are all alike, whatever their nationality. All they wanted from me was the most work for the least money. . . . So I became a Communist. (Nikita Khrushchev)

THE RAPID industrialization of the Donbass-Dnepr Bend occurred in what had been an economically undeveloped region, even by Russian stan­ dards. Before the last decades of the nineteenth century, the future home of Russia's most important mining and metallurgical region was of such little consequence economically that the sparsely populated agrarian area was still known by the epithet uUikoe pole," or "wild field." By the turn of the century, the Donbass-Dnepr Bend had one of the greatest regional concentrations of workers and large enterprises in all of Russia.1 The Donbass-Dnepr Bend was neither ideally suited for nor prepared to handle an economic boom in the late nineteenth century. Until relatively late in Russian history, when Catherine the Great colonized the region in the late eighteenth century, its vulnerability to invaders had kept it an un­ tamed frontier. The Donbass-Dnepr Bend is located on the seemingly endless southern steppe, and unlike the steppe to its north, it lacked even the protection offered by forests.2 Easily penetrable from all directions and the headquarters of the Cossacks, the Donbass-Dnepr Bend steppe had long attracted only fugitive serfs fleeing the worsening plight of the Rus­ sian peasantry. It is not surprising, then, that the abundant raw materials * On the eve of the 1905 Revolution, the southern industrial region possessed the thirdlargest number of workers in Russia, behind only the Moscow and St. Petersburg regions. The Donbass-Dnepr Bend ranked fourth if the Russian empire's Polish provinces are in­ cluded. 2 The only topographic feature of any prominence in the region is the Donets ridge, which proved to be of great economic significance as a coal repository. 1

16

CHAPTER 1

with which the Donbass-Dnepr Bend was blessed were left untouched when Russia first attempted to industrialize. Russia's first metallurgical boom occurred long before the boom in the Donbass-Dnepr Bend. Russia developed into the world's largest producer and exporter of iron in the late eighteenth century. It was the employment of cheap serf labor in the Urals, not advanced technology, that allowed Russia to attain and hold this position of international supremacy in met­ allurgy until the beginning of the nineteenth century. But the rapidly wid­ ening technological gap between Russia and the West, as well as the ab­ sence of coal in the Ural Mountains, took its toll. As John McKay summarized Russia's early industrial development: "A hearty newcomer under Peter and a lusty youngster under Catherine, eighteenth-century Russian metallurgy . . . failed to come of age and adopt the methods of the industrial revolution."3 The Russian iron manufactories in the Urals failed to introduce the technological breakthroughs that revolutionized the in­ dustry in Western Europe and the United States: coke smelting, puddling and rolling, the hot blast, and later the converter and the open-hearth fur­ nace. From its position as world leader, the Russian iron industry fell so precipitously that in the mid-nineteenth century it accounted for only 4 percent of world production.4 For an industrial renaissance to occur in Russia, resources outside the Urals, both natural and entrepreneurial, needed to be uncovered and exploited. It was military humiliation in the Crimean War (1853-56) that finally pushed the tsarist state to start implementing policies designed to promote rapid industrial development. Russia had been unable to sustain a war with the more industrialized European powers; the defeat exposed the extent to which military success was coming to depend on industrial development. Many of the most powerful figures in this still premodern, autocratic state grudgingly realized that unless Russia took the politically risky steps nec­ essary to facilitate the country's industrialization, the Russian empire's in­ ternational position would continue to deteriorate. A succession of finance ministers adopted measures that in combination represented an unprece­ dented government attempt to stimulate industrialization. Some of these measures—emancipation of the serfs, fiscal reforms and protectionist tar­ iffs, large-scale railroad construction, and the encouragement of foreign investment—were new to Russia, while other aspects of the government's financial policy, notably increased taxation of the peasantry, were all too familiar. In the short term, the government effort appeared to be a great 3 John P. McKay, Pioneers for Profit: Foreign Entrepreneurship and Russian Industrialization, 1885-1913 (Chicago, 1970), pp. 112-113. 4 Clive Trebilcock, The Industrialization of the Continental Powers, 1780-1914 (London, 1981), p. 207.

THE INDUSTRIAL BOOM

17

success.5 As the Donbass-Dnepr Bend enjoyed "an influx of capital and initiative beyond anything experienced in Russia since the time of Peter the Great," the region grew quickly and emerged as an internationally prominent industrial heartland.6 Over a dozen new iron and steel plants, which were for the most part as technologically sophisticated as any in the world, produced a growth rate with few parallels in the Western world. Donbass-Dnepr Bend industry grew with "American speed" to become the main Russian producer of iron and steel. Output statistics graphically demonstrate how suddenly heavy industry rose and flourished.7 After providing 0.3 percent of Russia's pig iron in 1867, the Donbass-Dnepr Bend in 1885 produced 2 million puds8 of pig iron, still only 6.2 percent of the empire's total production. In 1900, just fifteen years later, workers poured 91.8 million puds of metal out of Donbass-Dnepr Bend furnaces, over half (51.3 percent) of the Russian total. Russian output of pig iron increased 178 percent from 1885 to 1900, an increase due largely to the plants in the Donbass-Dnepr Bend; and Russia rose from eighth to fifth place among the largest producers in the world.9 By 1900, Donbass-Dnepr Bend workers on average were al­ most six times more productive than workers in the technologically back­ ward factories in the Urals.10 5 In

the 1890s, the annual rate of growth for the empire as a whole was 8 percent, impres­ sive by international standards (William L. Blackwell, The Industrialization cf Russia [New York, 1970], p. 42). Russian industry grew at an annual rate of almost 16 percent between 1893 and 1897 (Teodor Shanin, Russia as a tDeveloping Society', vol. 1, TheRoots of Otherness: Russia's Turn of Century [Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, 1985], p. 104). 6 Abraham C. Burstein, "Iron and Steel in Russia, 1861-1913" (Ph.D. diss., New School for Social Research, 1963), p. 157. 7 These output statistics demonstrating the growth of the Donbass-Dnepr Bend mining and metallurgical industries come from V. V. Morachevskii, "Promysly i zaniatiia naseleniia," in Rossiia: Polnoegeograficbeskoe opisame nashego otechestva, ed. V. P. Semenov-Tian-Shanskii (St. Petersburg, 1910), 14:370; Blackwell, Industrialization of Russia, p. 78; G. D. Bakulev, Razvitie ugol'noi promyshlennosti Donetshogo basseina (Moscow, 1955), p. 651; E. E. Kruze, Polozhenie rabochego Uassa Rossii ν 1900-1914gg. (Leningrad, 1976), pp. 78-79; and M. Balabanov, "Promyshlennost' Rossii ν nachale XX veka," in Obshchestvennoe dvizhenie ν Rossii ν nachaleXX-go veka, ed. L. Martov, P. Maslov, and A. Potresov (St. Petersburg, 1909), 1:51. 8 A pud is a Russian unit of weight equal to 36.11 pounds. 9 Production in the Donbass-Dnepr Bend was far more concentrated in large plants than production elsewhere in Russia. In 1900, plants with a capacity of over 80,000 tons ac­ counted for 66.5 percent of all the pig iron produced in the Donbass-Dnepr Bend, while in the rest of the empire almost the reverse was true—54.6 percent of the pig iron came from plants with a capacity below 16,000 tons (Konstantyn Kononenko, Ukraine and Russia: A History cf the Economic Relations between Ukraine and Russia, 1654-1917 [Milwaukee, 1958], p. 143). By the end of the century, the five largest Donbass-Dnepr Bend steel factories ac­ counted for almost half of all the pig iron smelted in Russia. Each one of these five steel factories produced more than the combined output of all forty-six of the smelters operating in Russia's central industrial region, which was even more technologically backward than the Urals region (Burstein, "Iron and Steel," pp. 170,172,194, 198). 10 S. I. Potolov, RabochieDonbassa νXIX veke (Moscow-Leningrad, 1963), p. 99.

18

CHAPTER 1

Mining also achieved a remarkable growth rate during the late nine­ teenth century. Coal mining began earlier than the metallurgical industry in the Donbass-Dnepr Bend, but it is only in comparison with metallurgy that the coal industry's growth could be considered anything less than me­ teoric. The mining of the Donets coalfield's rich veins, which began in the late eighteenth centurv, progressed slowly until the region's late-nineteenth-centurv takeoff. Table 1 illustrates how rapidly coal mining grew in the Donbass-Dnepr Bend, especially between 1895 and 1900. With coal mines in the Donets Basin extracting 68 percent of the Russian total in 1900, the region's share of national output became even more dominant in coal mining than in metallurgy'. Similarly spectacular growth occurred in the Krivoi Rog iron fields, lo­ cated in the western part of the Donbass-Dnepr Bend. The Krivoi Rog held Russia's largest and richest iron deposits, although for all practical purposes no iron mining took place there before 1885. Just how litde was known of the Krivoi Reg's rich deposits prior to the late nineteenth cen­ tury is conveyed by a German traveler, who could write in 1841 that "in all of the South of Russia there is not one place where one could find any metal. This huge area of Europe is deprived of metals; not enough iron can be found to make a single nail."11 By 1900, Krivoi Rog iron-mine production accounted for over 56 percent of the Russian total. TABLEl

Coal Pnxluction in the Donets Basin, 1870-1900

1870 1875 1880 1885 1890 1895 1900

Donets Basin (in million puds)

Russian Total (in million puds)

Donets Basin's Penmtage ofTotal

15.6 51.4 86.3 114.9 183.2 298.3 671.7

42.4 104.3 200.8 260.6 367.2 555.5 986.3

36.8 49.3 43.0 44.1 50.0 53.7 68.1

Sourte: O. A. ParasunTco, r. (Kiev, 1963), p. 60.

Polazbenie i bor^ba rabochego Urnsa Vkramy, 1860-90-cgodyXDi

11 Quoted in Kononenko, Uirame and Russui, p. 141. Iron mining in the Krivoi Rog, and by extension the development of the Donbass-Dnepr Bend metallurgical industry, owes much to the perseverance of an eccentric nobleman, Aleksandr Pol'. After rediscovering the existence of iron ore in the Knvoi Rog in 1872, Pol' poured his considerable wealth into years of surveying and fruidess attempts to solicit governmental and private capital to mine this buried treasure. Nearh' bankrupt, Pol' hocked his family silverware and with the bor­ rowed money traveled to Pans, where he was welcomed. PoI' became a millionaire in 1880

19

THE INDUSTRIAL BOOM

TABLE 2 Iron Production in the Krivoi Rog, 1885-1900

1885 1890 1895 1900

Krivoi Rog (in million puds)

Russian Total (in million puds)

Krivoi Rog's Percentage of Total

118.5 376.7 968.3 3,440.9

1.067.6 1,802.4 2,823.0 6.111.7

20.9 34.3 56.3

11.1

Source: "Krivorozhskii zhelczorudnyi bassein," Bol'shaia sovetskaia cntsiklopcdiia, 1937, 35:66.

The economic boom in the Donbass-Dnepr Bend was the greatest suc­ cess story in Russia's late-nineteenth-century industrialization drive. The government deserves a large part of the credit. Construction of the Ekaterinin railroad line brought together the necessary ingredients for a modern metallurgical industry. Although the roughly two hundred miles separat­ ing the coal of the Donets Basin and the iron ore of the Krivoi Rog is not a great distance, the cost of transporting these bulky raw materials by ox­ cart or horse and wagon on dirt or, often, mud roads had been prohibitive. Construction of the Ekaterinin railroad began in 1879 and was completed in 1886. During the 1890s, railroad construction expanded so rapidly in the Donbass-Dnepr Bend that the region became interconnected by a rail­ road network denser than anywhere else in the empire.12 Providing a cheap transportation link between the region's iron and coal deposits and between the Donbass-Dnepr Bend and other regions of Rus­ sia, while crucial, was not the only way government-sponsored railroad construction stimulated industrial investment in the Donbass-Dnepr Bend. Russia's railroad-building boom during the late nineteenth century created an enormous demand for coal, iron, and steel. This demand, cou­ pled with guaranteed government contracts (at generously inflated prices) for the large quantities of rails and for the steel needed to manufacture locomotives and railroad cars—as well as concessions, low-cost state loans, direct subsidies, protectionist tariffs for coal, iron, and steel, and a govern­ ment campaign to publicize the high profits being made—attracted a flood of foreign investment into the Donbass-Dnepr Bend.13 following the founding of the French Company of Krivoi Rog Ores (Burstein, "Iron and Steel," pp. 159-160). 12 The distance covered by railroads in the Donets Basin increased from only 118 kilome­ ters in 1891 to 1,691 in 1893,2,272 in 1896, and 2,865 in 1898 (Bvirstcin, "Iron and Steel," p. 164; Kononenko, Ukraine and Russia, p. 205). 13 Most of the large foreign-owned steelworks earned only modest profits even during the boom in the second half of the 1890s, although investors in a few firms did indeed strike it

20

CHAPTER 1

Foreigners played the central role in the Donbass-Dnepr Bend's rapid industrial development; industrial workers employed there were far more likeh' to work for foreign bosses than not. A few Russian joint-stock com­ panies operated in the Donbass-Dnepr Bend, but French and Belgian cor­ porations built almost all the modern steel mills and the bulk of the large mines in the southern industrial region.14 Western European capital and technology also helped build the railways. The foreign contribution to the industrial development of the DonbassDnepr Bend began even before the opening of the Ekaterinin railway. A single foreign industrialist, the celebrated Welshman John Hughes, showed the way by building a modern ironworks in the Donbass—Dnepr Bend in the early 1870s. With the backing of financial circles in England and leading governmental figures in St. Petersburg, Hughes put into op­ eration in Iuzovka (Hughes-ovka) the first of the Donbass-Dnepr Bend's large, modern ironworks, and he opened coal mines just outside the city. The factory and mines together employed almost thirteen thousand work­ ers by the late 1890s. The Russian government had encouraged Hughes to invest by granting him free rights to the coal and iron on the rich crown lands there, a thirty-seven-year loan of half a million rubles, and a premium on the pig iron and rails he produced. Even with all this support, the dif­ ficulties of manufacturing on the steppe proved enormous. Despite pro­ ducing more pig iron than any other company in Russia, Hughes's firm, the New Russia Coal, Iron, and Railmaking Company, "almost closed for good" in 1885, according to one contemporary study.15 ITie potential prof­ itability of Hughes's venture was realized only after the completion of the Ekaterinin railway and the introduction of additional protectionist mea­ sures in the following year. The New Russia Company's profits began to soar, and foreign investment poured into Donbass-Dnepr Bend industry. Russians and Ukrainians displayed little interest in investing in Don­ bass-Dnepr Bend industry.16 Following the opening in 1887 of the sole rich. Between 1895 and 1900, the earnings of some of the mills—namely, the few integrated mills that possessed their own iron ore and coal mines—soared to around 40 percent annually over the cost of production. Thev distributed annual dividends of over 20 percent on the principal investment (Burstein, "Iron and Steel," pp. 56-61; Peter GatrelL, Tbe Tsarist Econ­ omy, 1850-1917 [New York, 1986], p. 211). 14 V. V. Modestov, Rabocbet ι pmfiotuznoe dptzhenu r Donbasse do vclikot oktiabr^skoi satsialisticbeskot rtvoliutsii (Moscow, 1957), p. 6. From 1888 to 1902, foreigners invested 316 million rubles in 112 enterprises in the Donets Basin (I. Berkhin, Luganskaia boi'sbevtstskaia organizatsita νpcnodcperm russkot revoliutsti [Leningrad, 1947], p. 6). 13 Paul Chapuy, "Journal de voyage, 1887: Russie, Bassin du Donets," student senior the­ sis, Ecole supdrieure des Mines (Paris, 1887), cited in McKay, Pioneers fin· Profit, p. 96. 16 To be fair, native entrepreneurs failed to invest in the Donbass-Dnepr Bend at least parth' because they were not in a financial position to do so. Even with the state's considerable assistance, to build a modern steel mill required enormous capital, technical expertise, and a

THE INDUSTRIAL BOOM

21

Russian-built metallurgical factory—the enormous Briansk Ironworks in Ekaterinoslav, which employed more than seven thousand workers during the 1890s—fifteen large foreign-owned steel mills opened in rapid succes­ sion in southern Russia. By the first years of the twentieth century, foreigncontrolled companies produced about 90 percent of the iron and steel in the Donbass-Dnepr Bend.17 In some respects, the economy there was tied more closely to Europe than to central Russia. In addition to the capital invested in Donbass-Dnepr Bend industry, almost all the technology and know-how—including, initially, the most highly skilled laborers, foremen, technicians, engineers, and directors—were European in origin. Their par­ ticular nationality depended on the origins of a firm's capital. At the New Russia Company's ironworks in Iuzovka, for example, Englishmen initially filled almost every responsible position, from director down to highly skilled worker.18 By the end of the century, however, plants reduced some­ what their reliance on foreign administrators and skilled workers, supple­ menting them with personnel educated and trained in Russia.19 The Donbass-Dnepr Bend's modern steel mills exemplified what Alex­ ander Gerschenkron meant when he attributed Russia's rapid economic growth to the advantages of industrializing late.20 Foreign investors thought the positive aspects of the Donbass-Dnepr Bend's clean slate out­ weighed the negative aspects of investing in an economically backward and undeveloped region. Foreign steel producers in already-developed coun­ tries considered the Donbass-Dnepr Bend a perfect place to implement recent scientific discoveries and technological innovations in metallurgy. The costliness of reequipping outdated steel factories in developed West­ ern regions was a disincentive that did not exist in the Donbass-Dnepr willingness to invest in long-term projects. The modem stock corporation is best suited for such ventures, and in Russia the capitalist form of ownership was still mostly personal and familial (Burstein, "Iron and Steel," p. 167). 17 A. I. Fenin, Vospominaniia inzhenera: K istorii obshchestvennogo i khoziaistvennogo razvitiia Rossii, 1883-1906 (Prague, 1938), p. 8; Ralph Carter Elwood, Russian SocialDemocracy in the Underground: A Study of the RSDRP in the Ukraine, 1907-1914 (Assen, the Netherlands, 1974), p. 7; John P. McKay, "Foreign Businessmen, the Tsarist Government, and the Briansk Company," Journal of European Economic History 2, no. 2 (1973): 274-280 and "Elites in Conflict in Tsarist Russia: The Briansk Company," in The Rich, the Well Born, and the Pow­ erful, ed. Frederic Cople Jaher (Urbana, 111., 1973), pp. 179-202; V. V. Morachevskii, "Eka­ terinoslav i raskhodiashchiiasia ot nego puti," in Semenov-Tian-Shanskii, Polnoegeograficheskoe opisanie, 14:567. 18 F. Zaitsev, "Bol'sheviki Iuzovki do 1918 g.," LiteratumyiDonbass, no. 10-12 (1933): 154. 19 Istoriia ekaterinoslavskoisotsial-demokraticheskoi organizatsii, 1889-1903,ed. M. A. Rubach (Ekaterinoslav, 1923), p. xxxii. 20 Alexander Gerschenkron, Economic Backwardness in Historical Perspective (Cambridge, Mass., 1962).

22

CHAPTER 1

Bend.21 In the late nineteenth century, the annual output of an average blast furnace in the Donbass-Dnepr Bend exceeded that of one in Great Britain, Germany, France, or Belgium. Only the furnaces in the United States produced more.22 Russian operations functioned alongside foreign-owned enterprises to a greater extent in the coal industry than in metallurgy. But even in mining, domestic ownership dramatically declined in the late nineteenth century. In the first half of the nineteenth century, the Donbass-Dnepr Bend coal industry consisted almost entirely of extremely small, Russian-owned mines. These simple operations were referred to as peasant mines, and they could extract coal only from seams close to the surface. "Whether on gentry or communal lands, they were actually litde more than small vertical holes a few meters deep. A hand-operated windlass raising and lowering a bucket of coal, just as in a well, was the most sophisticated device."23 It is not surprising, then, that by 1890 peasant mines were responsible for only around 3 percent of the Donbass-Dnepr Bend coal industry's produc­ tion.24 While there was more than enough shallow coal to keep such peas­ ant operations busy, most Donbass-Dnepr Bend coal was located in seams over one hundred meters below the surface. The construction of deep shaft mines required capital and expertise far beyond peasant capabilities. Members of the local nobility opened most of the first large coal mines in the Donets Basin. A few of these landowners, such as the Rutchenko family, invested thousands of rubles in the mines constructed on their land. Generally, though, local industrialists were reluctant to invest in laborsaving machinery and equipment. Noble mines were often just larger versions of the peasants' primitive operations. Even when blessed with rich coal deposits on their land, noblemen in the Donets Basin were no more mo­ tivated to become serious businessmen than were the majority of their peers elsewhere in Russia. For most, coal mining was merely a sideline, a supplement to their agricultural earnings. The emancipation of the serfs deprived these coal operators of their cheap labor force, and during the 21 French and Belgian corporations built steel plants in the Donbass-Dnepr Bend that were even more sophisticated than most plants in their home countries. In McKay's words: "Major foreign newcomers after 1885 did not evolve gradually from modest beginnings through long-term reinvestment of profits, as most enterprises in western Europe or northern Russia had done, but rather sprang fully grown into existence" (Pioneers fin· Profit, p. 159). The Nikopol'-MariupoP Metallurgical Company, located just outside the Donbass-Dnepr Bend, bought an entire functioning pipe plant in America and then reassembled it beside its "ultra­ modern American-style blast furnaces" (ibid., p. 184). 22 Ibid., p. 123. 23 Ibid., p. 144. Hitting solid rock or water brought this type of mining to a stop. Com­ monly, such mines also temporarily ceased operating whenever farming called (Iulii Gessen, Istortia^ornoraboebikh SSSR, vol. 2, Vtoraiapolovina 19-go vcka [Moscow, 1929], p. 106). 24 Potolov, Rabocbte Donbassa, p. 83.

THE INDUSTRIAL BOOM

23

course of the Donbass-Dnepr Bend's industrialization drive, the role of such local industrialists rapidly decreased until it was negligible.25 With the winnowing out of the smaller, domestic coal operators, it was not just the steelworkers who worked in large, foreign-owned enterprises. Miners employed at the sixteen largest mines extracted over 73 percent of the Donbass-Dnepr Bend's total coal output in 1900, while miners at just the seven largest extracted 44 percent.26 But even in the large, relatively modern mines that foreign firms built, mechanization was limited to bring­ ing coal above ground. Down in the dark shaft, a miner cut the coal "sit­ ting, kneeling, lying on his side, his back, or his belly," usually equipped with nothing more sophisticated than a pick, hammer, and shovel.27 The foreign-owned coal industry in the Donets Basin chose not to invest in drills, preferring to rely on Russia's cheap labor despite the difficulties in recruiting a stable, hardworking labor force. The growth of the mining and steel industries also stimulated the growth of metalworking, machine building, chemicals, engineering, and other support industries, which employed large numbers of workers in the Donbass-Dnepr Bend. Fourteen finishing steel plants, fifteen machineconstruction and mechanical factories, and seventeen other factories were constructed in the Donbass-Dnepr Bend between 1887 and 1897 to man­ ufacture tools and some of the machines needed in the steelworks and mines.28 As important as the metallurgical, mining, and auxiliary industries were, however, other sections of the Donbass-Dnepr Bend economy showed litde vitality and remained technologically backward. The boom was ex­ tremely uneven and narrow in its scope, as mechanization did not reach beyond heavy industry. The government offered subsidies and guaranteed 25 Nine of the 86 delegates at the first meeting of the Association of Southern Coal and Steel Producers in 1882 identified themselves as landowners; in 1914, only 2 of 489 did so (Susan P. McCafiray, "The Association of Southern Coal and Steel Producers and the Prob­ lems of Industrial Progress in Tsarist Russia," Slavic Review 47, no. 2 [1988]: 466). 24 O. A. Parasun'ko, Polozhenie t bor'ba rabochego klassa Ukrainy, 1860-90-c goAy XDC v. (Kiev, 1963), p. 58; V. I. Bovykin, "Kontsentratsiia promyshlennogo proizvodstva ν Rossii ν kontse XDC—nachale XX v.," Istorkhcskie zapiski 110 (1984): 186-187. Just over one hun­ dred coal mines were in operation in 1900. This number does not include peasant mines, which were so small they accounted for a negligible share of the total amount of coal ex­ tracted. The domination of the Donbass-Dnepr Bend coal industry by large mines had been advanced by the crisis in 1881-82, when overproduction caused prices to drop and forced many smaller mines to close. 27 V. N. Rubin, "Rabochii vopros na s"ezdakh gornopromyshlennikov Iuga Rossii," in Nekotorye problemy klossovoi bor'by ν periode kapitalizma (Moscow, 1966), pp. 4—5. See also McCaiiray, "New Work," pp. 57, 114-115; Morachevskii, "Ekaterinoslav," p. 841; Potolov, Rahochie Donbassa, pp. 83—84; and McKay, Pioneers for Profit, p. 382. 28 Alfred J. Rieber, Merchants and Entrepreneurs in ImperuU Russia (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1982), p. 238.

24

CHAPTER 1

contracts only to heavy industry, and foreign corporations showed no in­ terest in investing in other sectors of the Donbass-Dnepr Bend econ­ omy.29 A sea of agrarian backwardness surrounded the islands of industry. The development of the Donbass-Dnepr Bend metallurgical industry did not even bring metal plows to the local peasantry; within sight of the mills, peasants could be seen plowing with dull, timeworn wooden plows. Pov­ erty in the Ukraine and throughout Russia also essentially precluded the production of metal for consumer goods; one historian graphically de­ scribed the peasants' situation: 'The Ukrainian population was supplied with iron and its products on a starvation level; 98% of the peasants' homes were straw-thatched, all utensils were earthenware, not only in the villages, but also to a large extent in the cities, carts had wooden axles, gates and doors were hung on wooden hinges."30 While the undeveloped char­ acter of the Donbass-Dnepr Bend economy obviously did not deter for­ eign investors, the British, French, Belgian, and German capitalists under­ estimated the problems new industrial enterprises would face on the "naked" steppe—namely, the lack of even an elementary infrastructure (other than the railroad) and the absence of a sufficient pool of workers, experienced or otherwise.

The workers Donbass—Dnepr Bend industrialists managed to recruit lived and worked in three distinct industrial environments: the older cities sud­ denly transformed by the economic boom, such as Ekaterinoslav and Lu­ gansk; new industrial towns, exemplified by Iuzovka; and mining settle­ ments that grew from scratch or from tiny villages, such as Rutchenkovka. Ekaterinoslav was the only truly large industrial city to rise on the Don­ bass-Dnepr Bend steppe (prior to Stalin's industrialization drive in the 1930s). In addition to its much greater size, Ekaterinoslav5S older and more diversified character distinguished it from the other two types of in­ dustrial centers that emerged in the Donbass-Dnepr Bend. No Donbass-Dnepr Bend city ever challenged EkaterinoslaVs position as the premier city in the region. Of course, with respect to the period before the late nineteenth century, that is saying very litde. Ekaterinoslav itself exhibited no vitality whatsoever before the mid-1880s, when smoke began belching out of the tall smokestacks of the city's new Briansk steel 29 The narrow scope of the government's intervention in the economy and the ways in which the government's demand for credit hindered capital formation in the private scctor have led economic historians such as Peter Gatrell to argue recendy that the tsarist state's role in promoting industrialization has been overstated (GatrelL1 The Tsarist Economy, p. 232). 30 Kononenko, Ukrtune and Russia, pp. 153-154.

THE INDUSTRIAL BOOM

25

plant. Until then, Ekaterinoslav was just a small provincial capital, where the rhythms of daily life were ever so slow. EkaterinoslaVs history illustrates how suddenly industrialization and the concomitant urbanization occurred in the Donbass-Dnepr Bend. Cath­ erine the Great founded the city of Ekaterinoslav at the site of a Cossack village in the late eighteenth century to commemorate and preside over the domestication and planned economic development of New Russia, as the whole steppe between the Black and Azov seas was called.31 She and her favorite, Prince Grigorii Potemkin, the city's first governor-general and the de facto viceroy of southern Russia, had big plans for Ekaterinoslav. Po­ temkin envisioned Ekaterinoslav as the "Athens of southern Russia" and as Russia's third capital—"the center of the administrative, economic, and cultural life of southern Russia."32 The autocracy spent enormous sums of public money on the city. The city center was carefully planned along lines much more imperial than those normally imposed on imperial Russia's provincial administrative centers. Long, wide streets were laid out, with huge squares and spacious parks. That the city would not come close to fulfilling the grandiose hopes of its founders became quickly apparent. "In 1795, the only inhabitants . . . were a few officials, a few soldiers and a few peasants. All that remained of the original dream were the imposing palace and the expensive orangeries of Potemkin on which millions had been wasted."33 Ekaterinoslav became a sleepy provincial center of the sort that abounded in pre-emancipation tsarist Russia. In the middle of the nineteenth century, the city fathers were the first to admit that Ekaterinoslav stayed alive "thanks solely to its im­ portance as the major administrative point in the province."34 Tallow melt­ ing was the city's leading industry.35 Ekaterinosla^s lack of population growth reflected its economic stagnation. The census takers counted a pal­ try 8,476 city residents in 1844, a decrease of 107 residents since 1811. The veneer of urbanity that existed in mid-nineteenth-century Ekateri31 Catherine's armies had just acquired this part of the Ukraine from the Turks. In 1926 the Soviet government changed the city's name to Dnepropetrovsk. 32 uEkaterinoslavskaia gubemiia," in Ekonomicbeskoe sostoianie gorodskikh poseUnii Evropeiskoi Rossii ν 1861-62 g. (St. Petersburg, 1862), 1:4-6, quoted in Daniel Brower, "Urbanization and Autocracy: Russian Urban Development in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century," Russian Rrvtew 42, no. 4 (1983): 383. 33 R. N. Bain, Slavonic Europe: 1447-1796 (Cambridge, England, 1908), p. 415. EkaterinoslaV^s failure to grow had more to do with the city's isolation than its layout. Ekaterinoslav arose on what was still largely an empty steppe, an isolated frontier cut off from the rest of Russia and devoid of entrepreneurial talent (Xavier Hommaire de Hell, Travels in the Steppes of the Caspian Sea, the Crimea, the Caucasus, &c. [London, n.d.], p. 69). 34 "Ekaterinoslavskaia gubemiia," 1:4-6, quoted in Brower, "Urbanization and Autoc­ racy," p. 383. 35 W. H. Parker, AnHistorical Geography of Russia (Chicago, 1968), p. 248.

26

CHAPTER 1

noslav was extremely thin, even compared to other Russian provincial cap­ itals. Judging by the lack of regulation of traffic on the city's main boule­ vards, Ekaterinoslav made little attempt to impress the occasional visitor. In a letter written during a visit to the city, the critic V. G. Belinsky ob­ served that "pigs with their sucklings along with disoriented horses wan­ der" on the city's wide streets.36 Another commentator, A. M. Fadeev, noted that Ekaterinoslav residents did not seem to feel any compunction about letting their cattle loose to graze on downtown streets.37 This was the provincial backwater that would shortly become one of the most im­ portant industrial cities in the entire Russian empire. Industrialization catapulted Ekaterinoslav into the ranks of Russia's ten largest cities. Its strategic location explains the city's metamorphosis. The "capital" of Russia's southern industrial strip became both a railroad junc­ tion and a port. The Ekaterinin railroad line, connecting the iron mines of the Krivoi Rog with the coalfields of the Donets Basin, crossed the Dnepr River and joined the Moscow and Odessa lines in Ekaterinoslav. Although distant from both the iron and coal mines, Ekaterinoslav was the crucial Donbass-Dnepr Bend junction and a city with some available housing, and it therefore became a desirable location for a steel plant. Within a year of the completion of the Ekaterinin line in 1884, the Briansk Ironworks Company began construction of its giant steel mill in Ekaterinoslav. By the turn of the century, the view from the Dnepr River of EkaterinoslaVs old city center was obscured by smoke from the numerous new factories. Ekaterinoslav had become a classic example of a new industrial city, so rare in Russia. I. Kh. Lalaiants, an experienced Social Democratic activist from St. Petersburg, went south around the turn of the century to help organize the new working class in Ekaterinoslav. He later recalled his first impressions of the city: "Ekaterinoslav struck us as a seething, unusu­ ally rapidly expanding city. It was not a great provincial cultural or intel­ lectual center in the usual sense, such as Kiev for instance. But in Ekateri­ noslav, life was bubbling over—the life of big industry. . . . Soon after you became acquainted with the city, you were no longer drawn to Kiev, or Khar'kov, or other similar centers."38 In a similar vein, Luigi Villari, a for­ eign commentator, noted in 1905 that Ekaterinoslav produces a very different impression to that of most other Russian towns, even including the industrial centers. As a rule industrialism appears rather incongruous in Russia. . . . But at Ekaterinoslav one feels oneself at once 36Dnepropetravsku 200 let, 1776-1976: Sbornik dokumentov t matcrudov, ed. I. V. Vasil'ev (Kiev, 1976), p. 41. 37 Ibid., p. 48. 38 I. Lalaiants, "O moikh vstrechakh s V. I. Lcninym za vremia 1893—1900 gg.," Proletarskaia revoliutsiia, no. 84 (1929): 58—59.

THE INDUSTRIAL BOOM

27

in a really go-ahead industrial city. . . . There is no beauty and no picturesqueness in Ekaterinoslav, but there is an air of genuine activity and business which . . . may already stand comparison with some of the great industrial centers of Ger­ many or England; it is a business town existing solely for business. We are in the real "New Russia," the Russia that will some day occupy an assured place among the modern and industrial countries of Europe.3®

A massive influx of people into Ekaterinoslav followed the opening of the Briansk steel mill in 1887. No other factory in Ekaterinoslav ever equaled the Briansk mill in size, but soon dozens of other new industrial enterprises—mills, foundries, forges, engineering plants, and machine shops—were built on the fringes of the booming city. After the Briansk factory, the railroad was the largest employer in the city, for Ekaterinoslav5S railroad yard and maintenance and repair workshop were among the larg­ est in the empire.40 Ekaterinoslav, in contrast to the Donbass-Dnepr Bend's other industrial cities and towns, also offered a large number of nonindustrial jobs in which a worker's family members might work. With over two thousand stores and workshops, the city became an important retail and artisanal center for the region.41 Between 1887, when the Briansk mill opened, and 1904, Ekaterinoslav5S population more than tripled, from 47,000 to 156,611. In the larger time frame between 1863 and 1914, Ekaterinoslav grew twelvefold.42 By the turn of the century, 40,000 laborers worked in Ekaterinoslav and its in­ dustrial suburbs. About 30,000 worked in heavy industry; the remaining 10,000 were mostly artisans and service personnel, employed in the city's workshops, offices, and shops 43 While artisans lived near the center of town, most of EkaterinoslaVs in­ dustrial workers lived either in Chechelevka, the working-class district on the outskirts of the city, or outside the city limits in Ekaterinoslav5S largest suburbs, Amur and Nizhnedneprovsk. These working-class suburbs were located just across the Dnepr River, on the left bank. In the 1890s, a num­ ber of factories were built in or near Amur and Nizhnedneprovsk, so most Luigi Villari, Russia under the Great Shadow (London, 1905), pp. 103—104. Reichman, Railwaymen and Revolution, p. 18. 41 By the early twentieth century, over eighteen hundred stores did forty million rubles' worth of business annually; and nearly two hundred handicraft workshops produced con­ sumer goods in Ekaterinoslav (David Lane, The Roots of Russian Communism [Assen, the Netherlands, 1969], p. 159). 42 The smaller city of Tsaritsyn was the only sizable city in the entire empire to grow at a faster clip than Ekaterinoslav during this period (A. G. Rashin, Naselente Rassit za 100 let: 1811-1913gg. [Moscow, 1956], pp. 89-91). 43 Otchet komissii po ustroistvu narodnykh chtenti ν β. Ekaterinoslave za 1899god (Ekaterino­ slav, 1900), p. 36. 39

40

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CHAPTER 1

of the working-class residents there no longer needed to commute.44 As a result of this industrial development, Amur, which was just a dot on the map after its founding in 1875, began to grow rapidly in the 1890s.45 By the end of the century, urban and industrial growth had made Ekaterinoslav the fifth-largest manufacturing center in Russia. After its industrial and population explosion, Ekaterinoslav resembled Pittsburgh or Manchester more than the Athens of Potemkin's dreams. More typical, though, were the numerous new industrial towns the boom created. They represented "the closest approximation of tsarist Rus­ sian industrialization with that of the English Midlands."46 Here and there along the railroad lines crisscrossing the Donbass-Dnepr Bend, factory chimneys sprouted, alone and in groups, surrounded by worker huts and barracks, on what only recently had been open steppe with a scattering of villages. The pit chimneys and spoil heaps of mining settlements also quickly came to dot the Donbass-Dnepr Bend countryside. The factory town of Alchevsk, not far from Lugansk, had been litde more than a rail­ road station before the construction in 1895 of the Donets-Iur5Cvsk steel plant, which immediately employed four thousand workers.47 In the de­ cade from 1887 to 1897, a number of other industrial towns grew rapidly in the Donbass-Dnepr Bend. Druzhkovka grew from a railroad station with a few dozen employees to a town of 6,000, Krivoi Rog grew from 6,000 to 17,000, and Kamenskoe grew from 2,000 to 18,000. By 1903 Kamenskoe had doubled again, to 35,000.48 The population of Iuzovka, which was founded on what had been completely empty steppe in 1869, exceeded 40,000 in 1905.49 Regardless of their size, all these towns and cities grew up around new industrial enterprises and had little identity be­ yond that of factory or mining towns. The new Donbass-Dnepr Bend industrial towns were typically singleindustry, single-company towns. They lacked the diversity of older indusIuzhnaia zaria, August 20, 1906, p. 3. In the decade between 1895 and 1905, Amur's population increased from 3,000 to 11,000 (Morachevskii, "Ekaterinoslav," p. 556). The combined population of the two workmg-dass suburbs exceeded 20,000 in 1905 {Vef Ekaterinoslav [Ekaterinoslav, 1912], pp. 105-113). 46 William L. Blackwell, "Modernization and Urbanization in Russia: A Comparative View," in The City in RussumHistory, ed. Michael F. Hamm (Lexington, Ky., 1976), p. 308. 47 Patricia Herlihy, "Ukrainian Cities in the Nineteenth Century," in Rethinking Ukrainian History, ed. Ivan L. Rudnytsky (Edmonton, 1981), pp. 149-150. 48 Tsentral'nyi statisticheskii komitet Ministerstva vnutrennikh del, Goroda Rossii ν 1904 £odu (St. Petersburg, 1906); McKay, Ptoneen for Profit, p. 244; TsGAOR, DP OO, f. 102, 1898, op. 1, d. 4, ch. 18 (GubernatorKeUer—Zapiska po rabochemu voprosu ν Ekaterinoslavskoi gubernii ), p. 12. 49 M. S. Semenov, "Rostov-na-Donu i vostochnaia chast5 Novorossii," in Semenov-TianShanskii, Polnoegeograficheskoc opisanie, 14:841. 44

45

THE INDUSTRIAL BOOM

29

trial centers elsewhere in Russia. Alfred Rieber, arguing that DonbassDnepr Bend cities were more industrialized in the early twentieth century than the cities in any other Russian region, stated that 80 percent of the commercial-industrial population in Donbass-Dnepr Bend cities engaged in industrial activity. Iliat was roughly double the proportion in Moscow and the Baltic provinces, where only 43 and 35 percent of the commercialindustrial population worked in industry.50 To a greater extent than even other Russian industrial centers, Donbass-Dnepr Bend industrial towns lacked a sizable middle class to serve as a buffer between the industrial elite and the mass of workers. Squalor went hand in hand with the development of industry. Especially during the early years, Donbass-Dnepr Bend industrial towns and enter­ prises proved woefully unequal to meeting the enormous challenges of rapid industrial and population growth—namely, the challenges of creat­ ing a reasonably safe and pleasant environment. Donbass-Dnepr Bend in­ dustrial towns offered opportunity to young engineers, radical activists, and those in need of work, but journalists and writers described these fac­ tory towns and mining settlements in the same outraged tone their coun­ terparts in Europe and the United States used in discussing the misery in their own industrial slums. Much was written about how the factories and mines fouled the air with their smoke and fumes. The writer Konstantin PaustoVsky^s first impressions of prerevolutionary Iuzovka were of filthy air: 'The smoke came not only out of the factory chimneys, but out of all its buildings. The smoke was as yellow as fox fur, and it stank like burned milk. An improbable crimson flame danced over the open hearths. Greasy soot dripped from the sky. Everything that was supposed to be white took on a dirty gray color, with yellow designs in it."51 Iuzovka was the classic example of a rapidly growing Donbass-Dnepr Bend company town. But even Iuzovka and a few others of the new, large industrial towns had the semblance of a planned center in the classic style— which is not to say that the centers in these instant cities could compare with the city centers in the older provincial or even district capitals. Resi­ dents of Iuzovka considered its few paved streets a source of civic pride.52 50 Rieber, Merchants and Entrepreneurs, pp. 220-221; V. Semenov-Tian-Shanskii, "Gorod i derevnia ν Evropeiskoi Rossii,"ZlKTO 10, no. 2 (1910): 178-179. 51 Konstantin Paustovsky, The Story of a Life, trans. Joseph Barnes (New York, 1982), p. 429. 52 Iuzovka certainly had nothing comparable to the centerpiece of downtown Ekaterinoslav—Ekaterininskii Prospekt, a long, wide avenue with a tree-shaded promenade running down the middle, flanked by tram lines and lined by exclusive shops, government offices, an impressive gold-domed cathedral, a museum, churches, theaters, and hotels, all built of stone (TsGIA, f. 23, op. 30, d. 47, p. 122; Villari, Russia, pp. 103-111; Karl Baedeker, Russia [Leipzig, 1914], p. 401; V. D. Mashukov, Vospominaniia ogorode Ekatennoslave (1887-1910 gg.) [Ekaterinoslav, 1910], p. 3).

30

CHAPTER 1

Iuzovka's late-nineteenth-century pride in its three paved streets was not altogether unwarranted, since in smaller industrial towns even the main avenue and the central square were unpaved. Outside the center of town, however, all of Iuzovka's other streets were not only unpaved but without sidewalks or streetlights. In many ways, most of Iuzovka resembled more an overgrown village than a modern industrial center. Unpaved streets be­ came rivers of mud during much of the year, and even a team of four horses would have difficulty moving. The strong, hot, dry winds of summer turned the dirt streets into whirling clouds of dust, soot, and chicken feathers.53 Iuzovka displayed the squalid, unplanned, bustling look that came to typify new Donbass-Dnepr Bend industrial towns. For the most part, ur­ ban growth in the Donbass-Dnepr Bend occurred in what appeared to be a haphazard fashion. John Hughes's desire to be considered a model em­ ployer and to reduce labor turnover led the New Russia Company to con­ struct orderly rows of new housing for skilled members of the factory work force, but much of the town continued to consist of dense rows of flimsily built wooden hovels and clay huts covered with soot. Paustovsky remarked that "different neighborhoods were called by words like 'dog5 and 'filthy,' and the gloomy humor of the names is the best proof of just how wretched and miserable they were."54 The proper name of the working-class district known as "Dogpatch" (Sobachevka) was 'The Happy Homestead" (Veselyi khutor), which obviously invited this derision.55 In such districts, all but the most highly paid workers lived crammed together either in factory barracks or in a variety of different forms of private housing, often just mud huts workers built themselves. Miners employed in the New Russia Company's mines on the outskirts of town commonly resided in the most deplorable housing in Sobachevka and other neighborhoods scattered along the banks of the Kalmius River in Iuzovka. Pictures and descriptions of worker housing typically depict walls far from level and roofs that sink to one side or another. Visitors to Iuzovka were struck by the disparity between the large, modern steel factory and the slipshod buildings sur­ rounding it.56 Indeed, the contrast between the awesome factory John Hughes built and the squat clay shacks around it could seem surreal. At 53 M. Tatarskii, "Otchct ob epidemii kholery ν Iuzovkc i prilegaiushchikh shakhtakh i zavode Novorossiiskogo Obshchestva Bakhmutskogo uezda Ekaterinoslavskoi gubemii ν 1910 godu," Vraihebmsanitarnaia khrontka Ekatmnoslavskoigubcrnii, no. 2-3 (February-March 1911): 382; Zaitscv, "Bol'sheviki Iuzovki," pp. 152—153. 54 Story of a Life, p. 429. 55 N. M. Cheremukhin, "Kak zhivut i pitaiutsia rabochie Rykovskikh kopei ν poselke Iuzovke," Vrachcbno-sanitamaia kJmmiiaEkaterinoslavskoigubemii, no. 1 (January 1910): 1. 54 Villari, Russia, p. 103; TsGAOR, DP OO, 4-e d-vo, f. 102, 1907, op. 116, d. 18, ch. 9 (Po Ekaterinaslavskoi gub. obshchestvennoe nastroenie), p. 15.

THE INDUSTRIAL BOOM

31

night the bright lights of the factory emitted the only street lighting in the working-class district. With the pouring of steel after dark, orange and other fiery colors flashed across the night sky.57 The most isolated workers in the Donbass-Dnepr Bend—socially and politically, as well as geographically—were the miners. Although a few mines, such as those owned by the New Russia Company, were located just outside the steel towns, most coal miners lived in relatively small, re­ mote pit villages. The isolation of the typical mining settlement is easily explained. The location of accessible raw materials dictated where coal or iron companies could dig their mines and build their settlements, even in the absence of such basic amenities as roads. Just as smoke-shrouded Iuzovka can be considered the classic DonbassDnepr Bend factory boomtown in character and history, Rutchenkovka provides a classic example of a Donbass-Dnepr Bend mining settlement. In the 1860s, Rutchenkovka was still a tiny village in Ekaterinoslav prov­ ince, consisting of thirteen households with a total of 114 residents. Even then, though, the local peasants extracted coal from the extraordinarily rich seam lying just below their feet. Their landlord, Nikolai Rutchenko, built the first of a number of extremely shallow, primitive pits in 1860. When word spread of the profits made at Hughes's nearby mines, the Rutchenkovka coalfield attracted the attention of a number of foreign firms. In 1873 the French Mining Company reached an agreement with the Rut­ chenko family in which the company leased from the family approximately one thousand hectares for thirty-six years, at twenty thousand rubles a year.58 By the turn of the century, thousands of miners worked the French Mining Company's seven large mines in Rutchenkovka.59 In a recent social history of British coal miners, John Benson wrote that "there is a tendency to think of the traditional nineteenth-century mining community as being synonymous with all that is dreary and depressing. We think of a remote village or small town, built on a grid-iron pattern, with endless rows of insanitary, colliery-owned terrace houses, a few taw­ dry shops, lots of pubs, a chapel and perhaps a school, all dependent on one, or at most a handful of nearby pits."60 Benson disputes this bleak Vestnikluga, September 10,1905, p. 3; P. Smidovich, "Rabochie massy ν 90-x godakh," Proletarskaia revoliutstia, no. 36 (1925): 163. 58 TsGIA f. 23, op. 14, d. 52 (Otchety t balansy RutchenkovskUth kanunnougol'nykh kopet), 1 p. 9. 59 In 1903, 2,700 miners extracted 42 million puds of high-quality coal from the Rutchenkovka mines, which was worth 2,484,286 rubles. By 1910 the mines employed as many as 4,000 workers during peak times (I. I. Boikov, uOtchet ο kholernoi epidemii na rudnikakh Rutchenkovskogo gornopromyshlennogo o-va Bakhmutskogo u. VI-X 1910 goda," Vrachebno-sanitamaiakimmikaEkMerinoslavskoigubcrnii, no. 1 [January 1911]: 405). 60 John Benson, British Coal Miners in the Nineteenth Century: A SocuU History (New York, 1980), p. 81. 57

32

CHAPTER 1

stereotype of British mining settlements, but even such a portrait is rosy compared with actual conditions in the mining villages of the DonbassDnepr Bend. Only the most favored workers could hope for a residence as nice as a row house. Observers in the Donets Basin invariably reported mining settlements, such as Rutchenkovka, to be monotonously ugly. The typical mining set­ tlement was little more than a collection of squat huts and company hous­ ing. The main street was "a long, dingy lane flanked by time-worn shacks and raw-new barracks. A pall of coal dust enveloped everything."61 Worker barracks gave many Donbass-Dnepr Bend mining and factory towns "the appearance of an army camp."62 Typically, no greenery whatsoever could be seen around the mine or the nearly adjacent workers' barracks, although some of the largest mining firms planted some sort of public park.63 A severe housing shortage initially confronted the workers employed at almost every Donbass-Dnepr Bend industrial enterprise. Before the min­ ing and metallurgical firms began to devote considerable amounts of capi­ tal to the construction of worker housing, the Donbass-Dnepr Bend had a well-deserved reputation for the worst working-class housing conditions in Russia. As one contemporary publicist noted, "no speculator appeared in those solitary areas to construct houses to let for high rents."64 DonbassDnepr Bend enterprises had responded to the housing crisis by building housing for their clerical and technical staffs first.65 Before the end of the 1890s, all but the most highly skilled, highly paid workers lived crowded together in a variety of improvised living quarters unfit for human habita­ tion. Peasants mercilessly exploited the housing shortage in the villages near mines. One zemstvo doctor reported that many peasants charged min­ ers considerable rent for spots in their chicken coops.66 According to the Soviet historian A. A. Nesterenko, before the 1890s "the absolute majority of Donbass workers lived in zemlianki."67 Miners 61 Victor Kravchenko, I Chose Freedom: The Personal and Political Life (fa Soviet Official (New York, 1946), p. 35. That stark depiction was of a mining settlement in the Alchevsk district during the early 1920s, but its author could just as easily have been describing Don­ bass-Dnepr Bend settlements one, two, three, or four decades earlier. 62 Olga Crisp, "Labour and Industrialization in Russia," in The CambridgeEconomicHistory of Europe, ed. Peter Mathias and M. M. Postnan (Cambridge, England, 1978), vol. 7, pt. 2:370. 63 The South Russian Coal Company provided a spectacular exception to the rule. The company set aside one hundred acres in Gorlovka for a public park, in which it planted over a million trees (McKay, Pioneers for Profit, p. 246). 64 Marcel Lauwick, L'industrie dans la Russie meridionale, sa situation, son avenir (Brussels, 1907), p. 140, quoted in McKay, Pioneers for Profit, p. 246. 65 Crisp, "Labour and Industrialization," p. 369. 66 A. S. Kirzner, Gornorabochie Donbassa i Krivorozh'ia νperpoi rosstiskot revoliutsii (Kharkov, 1926), p. 7. 67 A. A. Nesterenko, Ocherki tstortt promyshlennosti ι polozheniia proletariats Ukrainy ν kontse XIX i nachaleXX v. (Moscow, 1954), p. 88.

THE INDUSTRIAL BOOM

33

themselves constructed these primitive, often quite large, earthen-floor dugouts from wood and clay supplied by the mines. Built with speed and economy foremost in mind, zemltanki quickly became terribly dilapidated. Workers slept on the earthen floors as well as on plank beds, and most zemltanki lacked even small windows. Privacy was an unknown luxury for the mass of Donbass-Dnepr Bend workers. At the Rutchenkovka mines, the average zemlianka provided shelter for fifteen workers. The number of workers reported to have lived crammed together in some zemltanki defies belief. To cite an extreme example—unbelievable even if it was during the summer and the miners worked different shifts—sixty Gorlovka miners re­ portedly shared a zemlianka seventy feet by sixty-three feet.68 Accounts of hygienic conditions in zemltanki present a gloomy picture. Cattle were said to live in better conditions.69 Zemstvo statisticians reported that just a cou­ ple of minutes in the stinking, stuffy air of a zemlianka was enough to drive them outside.70 Unfortunately, such conditions were often what migrant workers from the Russian countryside were accustomed to. Dismal conditions were not restricted to mining settlements, although miners generally did live much worse than steelworkers. When EkaterinoSlav5S governor reported to the ministry of internal affairs on the causes of an 1899 strike at the Providence steel mill, he emphasized the dehuman­ izing effects of housing conditions for steelworkers there: "While barracks and small houses provide housing for approximately 4,000 people, for the remaining 3,757 people accommodations consist of huts construrted of thin boards. . . . These huts serve as residences in winter as well as summer. Heavy rains turn their floors to mud, lowering conditions to an animal level. Men and women share common plank beds, which are infested with bugs."71 Zemltanki existed even in Ekaterinoslav, where they arose first on a stretch of city land on the outskirts of town. Ekaterinoslav residents had been able for decades to lease small parcels of this land from the city for family gardens and plots. During the first years of Ekaterinoslav5S industri­ alization, workers, along with some other members of the City5S new poor, simply seized parcels of this land. In place of vegetable gardens, a jagged line of huts appeared. This worker housing consisted largely of mud shan­ ties whose flat clay roofs had been plastered in a slapdash manner with tar. The city government lacked either the will or the means to evict the squat­ ters. Later, many of these mud houses were replaced by more substantial shelters, some of which were even built of stone. It was in this way that Chechelevka, the main working-class district in Ekaterinoslav, gradually Ibid. A. A. Auerbakh, "Vospominaniia ο nachale razvitiia kamennougol'noi promyshlennosti ν Rossii," Russkaia starina, 1909 (December): 557. 70 Potolov, Rabocbte Dtmbassa, pp. 170-171. 71 TsGIA, f. 574, 1902, d. 205, p. 33. M

69

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arose in an area almost adjoining the older, established districts of the city.72 During the economic boom of the 1890s, Donbass-Dnepr Bend enter­ prises embarked on a series of more ambitious housing and welfare im­ provements. Many firms began to build company housing on a large scale. The bigger Donbass-Dnepr Bend enterprises began to spend on average 10 to 15 percent of their budgets on housing and such other indirect labor costs as medical aid, worker insurance, and schools. This percentage far exceeded the national average in Russia and was much higher than the percentage the Western European corporations that owned most Don­ bass-Dnepr Bend mines and factories allowed for similar expenses in the West.73 By 1905 over 90 percent of coal and iron miners lived in company housing. Although most of these workers now lived in barracks, at some mines as much as half of the work force continued to be housed in com­ pany zemlianki. Donbass-Dnepr Bend steel companies in 1905 still pro­ vided housing for only 28 percent of their workers—partly because the better-paid steelworkers demanded higher-quality, more spacious housing than miners, but more because companies in the established cities of Ekaterinoslav and Lugansk never built housing. Even in Iuzovka, a consider­ able number of the more settled, highly paid factory workers rented quar­ ters of better quality than company housing, or even managed to buy a small house.74 Even though company barracks were a major improvement over zem­ lianki, they were nonetheless still quite makeshift. Typically, barracks walls were constructed of brick or stone, but approximately one-third had earthen rather than cement floors. Almost all had plank beds. Small in com­ parison with worker barracks built elsewhere in Russia, the usually oneroom structures in the Donbass-Dnepr Bend housed twenty-five to thirty workers and included a kitchen. The barracks residents commonly were divided into separate groups known as artels—work gangs consisting of as many as twenty members.75 Worker barracks generally received no sanitary supervision from the company and in almost every instance soon became filthy, even though artels customarily hired a woman to serve as cook and housekeeper.76 Gov72 Mashukov, Vospominanita, pp. 8, 82; Ivan Knyshev et al., Zarevo nad Brianskoi (Dnepro­ petrovsk, 1970), p. 12; L. Stai', "Ot narodnichestva k marksizmu," Istoriia ekaterinoslavskoi, p. 7. 73 Crisp, "Labour and Industrialization," p. 405. 74 TsGIA, f. 37, op. 58, d. 299 (Dnemik komtssii A. A. Shtofa), pp. 82, 90, 96; Iu. I. Kirtanov, Zhiznennyi uroven' rabocbikh Rossii: Konets XlX-nacbalo XX v. (Moscow, 1979), pp. 235, 263; Parasun'ko, Polozhenie i bor'ba, p. 165. 75 P. I. Pal'chinskii, "Zhilishcha dlia rabochikh na rudnikakh Donetskogo basseina," Gornyt zhurnal, no. 9 (September 1906): 441. 76 A. E. Vartminskii, "K voprosu ο zhilishchnykh usioviiakh gornorabochikh Donetskogo raiona," Vrachebno-santtarnaia khronika Ekaterinoslavskoi jjttbernii, no. 7-9 (July—September

THE INDUSTRIAL BOOM

35

ernment investigations of company housing in the Donbass-Dnepr Bend reported that these quarters "quite often appear to be breeding grounds for contagious diseases. The city administration does not turn its attention to these dormitories, viewing them as private apartments and therefore not subject to regular sanitary inspection, which would be highly desirable."77 One Russian mine administrator graphically related just how bug-infested the barracks were upon his arrival in the Donbass-Dnepr Bend: "After visiting three or four barracks, I was already tortured by bites and discov­ ered with horror that the top of my boot was so covered with bugs it seemed to be alive."78 Miners' lack of personal hygiene compounded sani­ tation problems. Even at mines with bathing facilities, miners lived coated with coal dust. U. S. Chursin later recalled that few of the seventy other miners he lived with in a company barracks "ever took the time to go to the bath [btmia], even on Saturday, because of the line."79 If the view was pleasing anywhere in a mining settlement such as Rutchenkovka, it was at the "colony," as the more or less comfortable com­ pound for the administrative staffs of the largest mines and factories was called. The colonies ensured that the management, the technical personnel, the "salaried employees" (or clerks), and often even the most highly skilled workers would not need to rub elbows with, or even see, the mass of work­ ers after the whistle signaling the end of their workday. The contrast be­ tween the living conditions of the mass of Donbass-Dnepr Bend workers and those of their enterprises' administration could not have been more stark. If the colonies did not always have a private park or apple and plum orchards—or even a man-made lake for boating and fishing, as in Iuzovka—they almost always included at least a tree-lined promenade. Those privileged workers granted an apartment in the colony could expect their residence to include a small yard. The grounds surrounding the residences of the directors of most of the large firms were full of greenery. To com­ pensate for working in such a hardship post, Donbass-Dnepr Bend indus­ trialists commonly tried to live as sumptuously as was possible on the steppe. In Iuzovka, where the New Russia Company owned large mines as well as its steel mill, the director had two mansions: one downtown with beautiful gardens; and the other outside town, a new estate that was built 1910): 502—504. The cook bought and cooked the artel's food and washed clothes. The artel often hired the wife of one of the artel members to be the cook, but it was almost as common for the cook's status and attachments to be far less clear. Artel "cooks" commonly also acted as a shared wife. Disputes over this "tsaritsa," or "madam," were often the cause of drunken fights in artel households (P. Algasov and S. Pakentreiger, Brianskie razboiniki [Moscow, 1929], pp. 14-15; Pridneprovskii krai, January 16,1900, p. 2). 77 TsGAOR, f. 7952, op. 6, d. 86 (Izdatel'stvo "Istorii fabrik i Zavodovir), p. 104. 78 Fenin, Vospominaniia, p. 56. 79 A. B. Zaks, "Trad i byt rabochikh Donbassa," in Istoriko-bytovye ckspcditsii, 1951-1953, ed. A. M. Pankratova (Moscow, 1955), p. 93.

36

CHAPTER 1

on a large tract of wooded land. Aleksandr I. Fenin recalled that when he became director of the Russian-Belgian Company's mine, he was "pro­ vided with an old landowner's house—quite a mansion—Aposhnianovka, with a big garden, a brook, a horse stable, and horses. We started living like true landlords . . . far removed from the noisy industrial invasion. Our life was almost idyllic."80 Similarly, the administration of the Hartmann factory in Lugansk lived on what previously had been a large noble estate. Surrounded by a wall and police, to some hostile eyes it conjured up a miniature Kremlin.81 In addition to family residences, the larger company colonies included a social center, usually named the English Club or the Engineers' Club. At the colony of the South Russia Dnepr Metallurgical Company in Kamenskoe, the club included a ballroom, "[a] richly decorated hall from whose ornate ceiling hung brilliant chandeliers that cast a glitter on the glossy parquet floors. The strains of music often came from the Upper Colony, signaling that a ball was being held for the management and the technical elite of the mill. Sometimes, perching on the wall, children of steelworkers watched as the masters played tennis or croquet."82 Such factory clubs usu­ ally explicitly prohibited membership to "persons employed . . . in the ca­ pacity of workers."83

Rapid industrialization and urbanization created especially harsh condi­ tions in the Donbass-Dnepr Bend, even by Russian standards. These con­ ditions laid the foundation for working-class discontent and created a po­ tential for mass unrest. To understand how that potential took the shape it did in the Donbass-Dnepr Bend, we turn now to the formation and com­ position of the region's working class and to the daily lives of the workers. 80 Aleksandr I. Fenin, Coal and Polaia in LaU Imperial Russia: Memom of a Russian Mtniry Engineer, trans. Alexandre Fediaevskv, ed. Susan P. McCaflfrav (De Kalb, 111., 1990), p. 71. 811. Nikolacnko, Rrmltutnonnoe dvizhenie ν Luganskt (Kharkov, 1926), p. 53; Boikov, "Otchet ο kholcmoi epidemii," p. 410; K. E. Voroshilov, Rasskazy ο zhizni (Vospominaniia) (Moscow, 1971), p. 154. To give an example of how much Donbass-Dnepr Bend managers earned, in 1903 the annual income of the top seven members of the Hartmann factory ad­ ministration ranged from 15,307 to 30,020 rubles—and this despite continual charges from all sides of mismanagement. 82 This plausible depiction appeared in the Soviet Academy of Scicnces' hagiographic bi­ ography of Leonid Brezhnev (the Academy of Sciences of the USSR, Leonid I. Brezhnev: PagesfivmHtsLife [New York, 1978], p. 18). 83 Quoted in A. I. Priimenko, Legal'nye organizatsti rabochikh Iuga Rossti ν period tmpenaltzma (1895g.-fevral' 1917g.) (Kiev-Donetsk, 1977), p. 124.

2 The Labor Force Life at the mines has the appearance of forced labor, which impels workers to flee at the first opportunity. (Governor ofEkatcrinoslav)

If the Russian people suffer more than other peoples, if the Russian proletariat is more exploited than any other proletariat, there exists yet another class of workers who are still more oppressed, exploited, and ill-treated than all the others; this pariah among pariahs is the Jewish proletariat. (Karl Kautsky)

THE PECULIAR formation and composition of the Donbass-Dnepr Bend mining and metallurgical labor force, as well as the concentration of Jewish artisans and merchants in the area, help account for the differences between the labor movement in the Donbass-Dnepr Bend and movements else­ where in Russia. Jews constituted a significant portion of the population— 20 to 35 percent—in the larger Donbass-Dnepr Bend industrial towns. The mining and metallurgical labor force contained an unusually high pro­ portion of migrants from distant provinces and was characterized by an unusually high rate of transience throughout the period this study covers. Most industrial workers in the region were "nomads alternating between industry and agriculture," as the French consul observed in 1893, which accounts for the extraordinary degree to which workers in the DonbassDnepr Bend exhibited a mixed mentality as "peasant-workers."1 1 Quoted in McKay, Pionem fi>r Profit, p. 247. Most Western historians have argued that even after years in industry, the mass of workers throughout Russia, to a far greater extent than their Western European counterparts, avoided becoming proletarianized. This view has long been hody contested, ever since the Marxist-Populist debates of the nineteenth century. Unlike Soviet historians, who have followed Lenin's thesis that workers' peasant ties were fast disappearing by the late nineteenth century and that proletarianization was at the root of labor unrest, Western labor historians have generally adopted, in a refined form, the Populist argument that except for an elite of skilled workers, Russian workers do not fit a Marxist or Western European model. For examples of Soviet attempts to buttress Lenin's anti-Populist

38

CHAPTER 2

The mass of Donbass-Dnepr Bend workers maintained especially strong ties to their native peasant communities. These ties account, to a large ex­ tent, for the transience and volatility of the Donbass-Dnepr Bend working class—two factors that contributed to the exceptional combativeness the region's labor movement displayed. But while peasant ties, labor turnover, and ethnic diversity were all exceptionally pronounced, it should be noted that differences between the Donbass-Dnepr Bend and other regions were a matter of degree. Those conditions existed elsewhere in modified forms, so that while provincial labor movements often did follow the lead of rev­ olutionaries in the capitals, conditions indigenous to the Donbass-Dnepr Bend also set the pattern for labor movements elsewhere. The Donbass-Dnepr Bend labor force was composed primarily of three distinct groups: skilled factory and railroad workers; miners and semi­ skilled or unskilled factory workers; and Jewish artisans. Workers in the first group, whose jobs entailed such skilled tasks as overseeing the "cook­ ing" and pouring of molten pig iron, rolling steel ingots into rails, pipes, and beams, repairing or servicing locomotives and rolling stock, and cut­ ting metal patterns for bearings and pipe ends, were similar to skilled work­ ers elsewhere in Russia. As in the capitals, the labor aristocracy of skilled steelworkers, and metal craftsmen and machinists in the railroad work­ shops and machine construction factories, were better paid; more literate, stable, and respected; and more likely to be attracted to revolutionary ac­ tivities than their less skilled and experienced fellow workers. Because labor historians have devoted considerable attention to this elite group, there is no need to dwell on it in this chapter. Semiskilled and unskilled workers, whose living and working conditions contrasted sharply with those of skilled workers, are emphasized here both because they remain litde studied and because of their pivotal role linking pogroms and strikes in the Donbass-Dnepr Bend. Most data on the re­ gion's semiskilled and unskilled workers concerns the miners, with whom contemporaries were particularly intrigued, but what is said about miners generally can be applied to the mass of factory, railroad, and construction workers. In fact, the unskilled workers often moved from job to job during their stays in the Donbass-Dnepr Bend. When the opportunity presented itself, coal miners exchanged their pit tools for the wheelbarrows and shov­ els of a factory yard gang. Regardless of which industry they worked in, unskilled workers typically had litde or no education, lived in deplorable conditions, and carried out dirty, grueling, and hazardous tasks. They lacked a long-term commitment to their jobs and responded to political argument, see Kruze, Polozhente rabochego klassa; and Iu. I. Seryi, Rabocbie Iuga Rossii ν period imperializma (1900-1913) (Rostov-on-Don, 1971). The most systematic Western treatment of the peasant elements in Russian workers' consciousness is Robert Eugene Johnson's Peas­ ant and Proletarian.

THE LABOR FORCE

39

events in a similar manner. The political history then being made in the Donbass-Dnepr Bend was a secondary concern for most of these workers, who generally were peasant migrants more interested in earning higher wages to improve their lot in the countryside. Later in this chapter, some attention will be devoted to the third com­ ponent of the labor force, which consisted of tailors, shoemakers, seam­ stresses, other artisans, and sales and clerical workers. The artisans and clerks working long hours in the Donbass-Dnepr Bend were mosdy Jew­ ish, which separated them from the skilled and unskilled industrial work­ ers—who were almost exclusively Slavs, primarily Russians. But artisans were like skilled industrial workers in that in addition to having acquired (or being in the process of acquiring) a specialized skill, they were more literate, stable, and urbanized than the mass of workers. During reaction­ ary backlashes to the revolutionary movement, skilled workers commonly chose to align themselves with Jewish artisans and clerks in opposition to the mass of unskilled and semiskilled workers and miners. Although arti­ sans and clerks were dispersed in numerous small shops, their relatively settled lives and ability to read—as well as the anti-Jewish atmosphere and policies of the Russian empire—help account for why a disproportionate percentage of them developed a revolutionary consciousness and became politically active.

Recruiting workers and establishing stability in the work force proved to be insurmountable problems for Donbass-Dnepr Bend metallurgical and mining enterprises.2 The recruiting problems were not the same in metal­ lurgy and mining, however. Here, as throughout this study, it is important to differentiate between the two industries. Donbass-Dnepr Bend indus­ try needed two distinct labor pools—skilled or trainable workers, and those with litde to offer beyond their muscles and a willingness to do heavy, sweaty, dangerous work. Both were in short supply, though for different reasons. For Donbass-Dnepr Bend mine operators, simply re­ cruiting enough workers, regardless of skill, was a never-ending, losing battle. The problem in the steel industry was the shortage of skilled and experienced workers, or applicants with the minimum of schooling thought to be necessary to make them suitable for training. Positions went begging at the coal mines, but there generally was no shortage of unskilled job seekers trying to find work at the modern, technologically sophisti2 Donbass-Dnepr Bend industrialists at the annual conventions of the Association of Southern Coal and Steel Producers complained about the labor shortages and high turnover more than about anything else. Their problems elicited little sympathy because of the high profits many of the large mining and metallurgical firms earned despite these labor conditions.

40

CHAPTER 2

cated iron and steel plants as manual laborers (chemorabochie) or day labor­ ers (podenshcbiki). Migrants flocked to the steel towns hoping to land one of the relatively well paid semiskilled jobs, such as helping to tend the in­ tensely hot and deafeningly loud furnaces or tearing down spent furnaces. The large number of less well paid jobs, which required the most simple manual labor—such as cleaning up and removing spilled metal or slag, or loading and wheelbarrowing coal—were often parceled out only on a daily basis and also could be hard to come by. At the Briansk mill in the 1890s, "the job seekers gathered at the factory gates in the early morning and at lunch time, waiting for the factory administrators, whom they would ask for jobs. The seekers almost always exceeded the number of jobs. . . . The bosses, feeling in command of the situation, would speak to no one, or worse—when the applicants gathered at the gates in crowds of a hundred or more, the bosses, for their own amusement, would order the watchman to pour water on them."3 No pool of experienced industrial workers existed locally from which Donbass-Dnepr Bend industrialists could draw. The number of skilled workers that these firms induced to leave other industrial regions in Russia fell far short of what was needed, even though native Russian skilled steelworkers could earn twelve hundred rubles a year in the Donbass-Dnepr Bend in the 1890s—far above the national average for working-class wages and far above what bookkeepers, policemen, or teachers earned.4 The Donbass-Dnepr Bend became a magnet for skilled workers from western and eastern Europe, as managers of the large, modern steel plants felt they had no choice but to "damn the expense" and recruit foreign workers to be foremen and to fill the most skilled jobs until their Russian apprentices could be trained.5 They paid imported foreign workers salaries triple and quadruple those of their Russian counterparts. The shortage of skilled workers was more serious in the metallurgical industry, but this is not to say that skill was not a desired commodity in the mines, too. A mine operator certainly valued highly any applicant ex­ perienced in dynamiting, masonry, carpentry, or mechanics, as well as min­ ing. But most skills in the mines could be taught comparatively easily, and mine operators faced with a chronic shortage of workers could hardly af3 K. Norinskii, "Moi vospominaniia," in OtOrufpyBlagoeva k "Sotuz Bor'by" (1886-1894), p. 24, quoted in Glickman, Russian FaOory Women, p. 5. The hiring bosses could not be as heavy handed during the hot summer months when it became more difficult to find applicants eager to work near the torrid furnaces. 4 In 1900, when the average industrial worker in Russia earned 204 rubles yearly, the av­ erage Donbass-Dnepr Bend miner earned 425 rubles (Akademiia nauk Ukrainskoi SSR, Istoriia rabochikh Donbassa [Kiev, 1981], 1:42; K. M. Norinskii, "Na svoikh khlcbakh," Istoriia ekatcrinoslavskoi, p. 39). 5 Lane, Roots, p. 159.

THE LABOR FORCE

41

ford to be discriminating when hiring. Generally, they were happy to hire anyone possessing strength and endurance. Some Donbass-Dnepr Bend mines operationally capable of extracting millions of puds of coking coal a year never extracted even half their capacity, simply because they lacked enough workers. The problem was so severe that on rare occasions the whole extracting process at a mine could grind to a halt.6 One obvious reason Donbass-Dnepr Bend heavy industry suffered se­ vere labor shortages was the speed with which the demand for labor grew as new industrial enterprises began production one after another during the 1880s and 1890s.7 Despite their success in recruiting increasing num­ bers of workers to the Donbass-Dnepr Bend, supply rarely met the demand. Other than through the very expensive option of importing workers from abroad, where could the necessary number of applicants be found? In Russia's old and economically more stable cities, former artisans and handicraftsmen, along with their children and the children of industrial workers, could make some contribution, albeit small, to the formation and replenishment of the working class during Russia's late-nineteenth-century industrialization drive. No similar resource existed in the Donbass-Dnepr Bend. As we have seen, urbanization there essentially coincided with in­ dustrialization. The number of local city-born or city-bred recruits in the Donbass-Dnepr Bend working class could only be minuscule. If labor was to be found locally, recruits from among the peasantry had to be the main source. It soon became clear, however, that most of these peasant recruits would have to come from distant villages. The relatively sparse population on the Donbass-Dnepr Bend steppe was only one rea­ son for the minimal contribution of the local peasantry to the mining and metallurgical work force.8 Donbass-Dnepr Bend industrialists were forced to look elsewhere for workers primarily because the native peasant popu­ lation displayed an especially deep aversion to industrial labor. This was particularly true when it came to working underground in mines, and for that reason this chapter will be devoted primarily to the formation and composition of the mining labor force. Pridnepnmkii krai, January 4, 1900, p. 1. the labor supply failed to meet the demand, from the 1860s to 1900 the indus­ trial labor force in the two Donbass-Dnepr Bend provinces, Ekaterinoslav and the Don Ter­ ritory, grew 1,240 and 2,300 percent respectively. This was a rate of increase far in excess of that in any other region of Russia. In just the last two decades of the nineteenth century, the Donbass-Dnepr Bend working class increased 1,000 percent (A. G. Rashin, Formirovanie rabochcgo klassa Rossit [Moscow, 1958], p. 193). 8 Before the industrial boom, the population density of such central Russian provinces as Kursk and Tula, which proved to be fertile recruiting ground, was over six and one-half times that of the Don Territory and almost two and one-half times that of Ekaterinoslav province (Rubin, "Rabochii vopros," p. 15). 6

7 Although

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CHAPTER 2

Local peasants sought work in mines only under extreme duress. Of course, as will become increasingly clear, Donets Basin mining had little (if any) intrinsic appeal for anyone, despite the opportunity to earn relatively good wages. There is no shortage of impressionistic and quantitative evi­ dence testifying to the backbreaking and dangerous nature of mine work in the Donbass-Dnepr Bend. In the view of the regional factory inspector V. Sviadovskii, even if the misery of French miners' lives described by Emile Zola in his novel Germinal were raised to the third power, that still "would not be a true representation of the heavy working and living con­ ditions of our workers."9 Underground explosions, such as the one killing fifty-six miners and badly burning sixty-three at the Rykov mine in January 1891, provided tragic reminders that mining could be lethal as well as backbreaking.10 But the rigors and dangers of the work do not explain why peasants in the Donbass-Dnepr Bend were in a better position than central Russian peasants to shun mining. Most of the Ukrainian peasants on the fertile Donbass-Dnepr Bend steppe farmed large amounts of land by Russian standards. Despite their own "land hunger" (the emancipatory legislation reduced by over one third the size of peasant land allotments in the region), which between 1905 and 1907 erupted in large-scale looting and destruction of gentry estates, Donbass—Dnepr Bend peasants enjoyed a relatively strong financial position and did not feel as strong a need to look for off-farm jobs to sup­ plement their household income as did their fellow peasants to the north.11 In addition, few were willing to enter the labor force of the local mines 9 Voenno-medmtnskti zhumal 160, no. 12 (1887): 489, quoted in Parasun'ko, Polozhenie i bor'ba, p. 221. 10 Donbass—Dncpr Bend miners lacked the skills and work habits necessary in such a dan­ gerous industry, increasing the risk of injury; but the mine operators and government deserve the bulk of the blame for the large number of accident victims. Operators not only failed to make working conditions safer, they ignored the regulations the tsarist government promul­ gated. In his sanitary inspection, the uezd doctor Bergun found forty-three of forty-nine Krivoi Rog mine operators in violation of the laws. Even at the turn of the century, around onethird of the workers of the average Donbass-Dnepr Bend mine suffered some sort of injury annually (Vestnik finansovpromyshlenntxti i torgtrpii, no. 1 [1908]: 11-12, cited in Theodore H. Friedgut, "Labor Violence and Regime Brutality in Tsarist Russia," Slavic Review 46, no. 2 [1987]: 246; Parasun'ko, Polozhente i bor'ba, pp. 179-186). The mining engineers and factory inspectors charged with the job of rectifying miners' and steelworkers' just grievances were grossly overtaxed. In the 1880s, for example, a single assistant aided the factory inspec­ tor responsible for the nearly 150,000 square miles and thousands of enterprises in the Kharkov factory district, of which the Donbass-Dnepr Bend was only a small part. This district, which extended from Tula to Baku, encompassed an area larger than Great Britain (Frederick C. Griffin, "The Formative Years of the Russian Factory Inspectorate, 18821885," SlavicReview 25, no. 4 [1966]: 644). 11 Unlike peasants in central and northern Russia, peasants in the Donbass-Dnepr Bend traditionally had eschewed even cottage work (kustar and artisanal crafts) (Potolov, Rnhochie Donbassa, p. 117; Pal'chinskii, "Zhiiishcha," p. 422).

THE LABOR FORCE

43

because mine work and miners had long been held in contempt. Local peasants looked upon work in underground mines as convicts' labor, a view grounded in historical fact. Convicts exiled to work in the DonbassDnepr Bend provided the region with many of its first miners; and even as late as the end of the nineteenth century, some Donets Basin mines still sought to employ convict labor.12 In examining Donbass-Dnepr Bend labor unrest, it is important to keep in mind that mine operators were so desperate for workers during the latenineteenth-century boom that they remained far from selective about whom they hired. Even without convicts, Donbass-Dnepr Bend mines had more than their share of unsavory types. In the 1870s and 1880s es­ pecially, mines hired job seekers who would have been hard-pressed to find honest work elsewhere. One of the leading figures in the southern mining industry, A. A. Auerbakh, later recalled that when he first arrived at Kurakhovka and Rutchenkovka in the 1870s, "the worker contingent consisted almost exclusively of passportless vagabonds, the majority of whom were from the central provinces."13 Later—especially during bumper-crop years, when recruiting workers proved to be extra difficult—Donbass-Dnepr Bend employers continued to turn a blind eye to the passport system.14 For the mine operator, hiring workers who had no passports or whose papers had expired had obvious advantages beyond just filling positions. Illegal workers were in no position to go to governmental authorities to complain about illegal mine practices.15 The attraction and hiring of those outside the law and of unsavory char­ acters of all types contributed to the disdain the local population felt to12 The major mine in the Donbass-Dnepr Bend in the first years of the nineteenth century, the Lisichansk mine near Lugansk, employed convicts alongside compulsory serf labor. Later, at the annual conventions of the Association of Southern Coal and Steel Producers in 1892 and 1900, some industrialists sought to revive the practice of using convicts as a source of workers, with proposals to send a petition to the government requesting the transfer of con­ victs to Donbass-Dnepr Bend mines. These proposals failed. Opponents of the proposals reminded their fellow industrialists that to inject convicts into the body of workers was hardly a sound way to cure other aspects of the labor problem in Donbass-Dnepr Bend mines, since "the compulsory labor of convicts will always be less productive than that of free workers" (S. An-skii, "Ocherk kamennougol'noi promyshlennosti," Russkoe bojjatstvo, no. 2 [1892]: 13-14; see also Rubin,"Rabochii vopros," pp. 19-20). 13 Gessen, Istoniagomorabochikh, p. 88. 14 Potolov, Rabochie Donbassa, p. 103. Tsarist law required migrants to have a passport issued at their place of origin, as well as a residence permit from the police, to legally seek work and reside in a city. The Donbass-Dnepr Bend's reputation as a region in Russia be­ yond the law was not out of character historically. To the disenfranchised and alienated peas­ ants north of the Donbass-Dnepr Bend, the southern border had long been a place of relative opportunity and refuge (as was noted in chapter 1). 15 Gessen, Istorita ^omoraboehikh, pp. 89, 130; V. Kolpenskii, "Kholemyi bunt5 ν 1892 godu? Arkhiv truda νRossii, no. 3 (1922): 112.

44

CHAPTER 2

ward miners and to the low status of mining in their eyes. According to a priest in Iuzovka in 1905, the local peasants, who thought miners "capable of any vileness[,] .. . remained so estranged from the mine workers that mothers, wishing to discipline their children, threaten them with the bogey-man of the miners."16 Local Ukrainian peasants in need of wages favored agricultural labor on the large southern estates or in the region's older, small industrial enter­ prises such as the distilleries, even though mining and metallurgy paid much better. When peasants overtaken by extraordinarily dire circum­ stances (and perhaps fit for no other work) sought employment in coal mining, they often preferred to work for local kulaks in the so-called peas­ ant mines.17 These coal mines offered much lower wages than the larger enterprises, but the locals considered these shallow mines to be more ap­ pealing. The peasant mines did not require long days underground breath­ ing air polluted with coal dust in dank, dark, cramped pits, in which fires, cave-ins, the release of poisonous gas, drownings, and other accidents left miners disabled or dead at such an appalling rate.18 The local peasants also considered peasant mines to be more attractive because they were owned and worked solely by fellow peasants.19 Those local peasants who did go work among the migrants in the large, usually foreign-owned mines typi­ cally accepted only one of the many low-paid jobs above ground.20 Peas­ ants in the Donets Basin willing to mine also often chose to leave the basin to work in the Krivoi Rog iron mines. Iron mining was preferred to coal mining because it generally did not require going underground. In con­ trast to coal mines, iron mines were open pits.21 The Donbass-Dnepr Bend miners who constituted the so-called local contingent in any particlar mine were rarely peasants from neighboring villages. The local miners were typically drawn from villages eighty or more Quoted in Friedgut, Iuzovka and Revolution, 1:207. Potolov, Rabocbie Donbassa, p. 118. 18 Working in a large mine possessed one appealing feature that other forms of industrial labor lacked. Once they descended into the pit, the small crews of miners working in the numerous dark tunnels and chambers enjoyed freedom from close supervision by manage­ ment. Under these conditions, the operators ensured production by tying wages to the amount of coal the work crews extracted. 19 N. S. Avdakov, Ό mcrakh k obezpecheniiu gornykh promyslov rabochimi rukami i ob ucherulirovanii prodazhi vodki ν raione gornykh promyslov," Doklad komissit XVlLl savet s"czda (Kharkov, 1894), p. 334. 20 As many as one-third of the workers in the Donbass-Dnepr Bend coal industry worked above ground, primarily sorting coal or tending the coke ovens (L. M. Ivanov, "Pod"em massovogo dvizheniia gomozavodskikh rabochikh Donbassa lctom 1906," in Iz istorii rabochego klassa i revoliutstonnogo dvizheniia, ed. V. V. Al'man [Moscow, 1958], p. 355). 21 E. Taskin, K voprosu ο prtvlechentt i uderzhanti rabochikh na kamennougol'nykh kopiakh Donetskogo basseina (Kharkov, 1899), p. 14. 16

17

THE LABOR FORCE

45

versts away.22 Peasants who lived near large mines, by that very fact, often were those least in need of such work, since the local population often profited from the opening of a mine. Renting and selling commune land, or only the right to mine it, put money in the peasants' pockets, permitting them to manage without help from mine wages.23 The Donbass-Dnepr Bend labor force was extremely migratory, even by Russian standards. The typical Donbass-Dnepr Bend miner or steelworker—80 percent of such workers, according to some sources—was a migrant drawn from a distant village.24 In the Imperial Russian Census of 1897, Ekaterinoslav province ranked second only to St. Petersburg in the percentage of its workers who were migrants. The Don Territory, which encompassed a part of the Donbass-Dnepr Bend that fell outside Ekaterinoslav province, had the third-highest percentage of migrants.25 During the late nineteenth century, the rapidly expanding demand for workers and the relatively high wages paid in Donbass-Dnepr Bend mines and factories became increasingly well known in remote central Russian villages, provoking mass migrations.26 Central Russian villagers suffered most from the "agrarian crisis" afflicting the Russian peasantry.27 Rapid growth in the peasant population without commensurate growth in avail­ able land led to tiny subdivisions of holdings. Combined with the failure of most peasants to abandon the primitive agricultural techniques of their Fenin, Vospominaniia, p. 18. "Zhilishcha," p. 422. 24 Trudy XVIH s"ezda jjornopromyshUnnikov Iuga Rossii, byvshego ν β. KhatjIarpe s 1 po 14 dekaima 1893goda (Kharkov, 1894), p. 334. The percentage of Donbass-Dnepr Bend work­ ers classified as migrants varied from year to year but usually presented roughly the same picture. As late as 1907-8, according to data provided by the Association of Southern Coal and Steel Producers, 80 percent of the 180,000 miners in the Donbass-Dnepr Bend were migrants, mostly from the black-soil villages of central Russia (A. L. Smidovich, "Ob organizatsii nochlezhno-prodovol'stvennykh punktov dlia gomorabochikh," Vrachebno-sanitarnaia khronikaEkaterinoslavskoigubemii, no. 11-12 [November-December 1910], p. 750). 25 According to the 1897 census, 72.6 percent of the industrial workers in Ekaterinoslav province were natives of some other province or country. Migrants accounted for 70.6 per­ cent of the workers in the Don Territory (Rashin, Formirovanie, pp. 358-359). The native workers employed in industry in Ekaterinoslav province and the Don Territory worked pri­ marily in very small enterprises; when only workers employed at industrial enterprises with over five employees are counted, the percentage of migrant workers in Ekaterinoslav province exceeded St. Petersburg's percentage to become the highest of any Russian province—82.8 percent according to a 1902 census (Α. V. Pogozhev, Uchet Mslenmsti i sostava rabochikh ν Rossii [St. Petersburg], cited by Rashin, Formirovanie, p. 362). 24 According to the 1897 census, 74 percent of the coal miners in the Donbass-Dnepr Bend were Great Russians (Elwood, Russian Social Democracy, p. 9). 27 One measure of peasant impoverishment was that in 1904 in the provinces of Orel, Voronezh, Tula, Tambov, and Riazan, over a quarter of the peasants did not own horses (Martin Gilbert, Atlas of Russian History [New York, 1972], p. 68). 22

23 Pal'chinskii,

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ancestors, this meant that most central Russian peasant households were steadily losing their ability to live off the land and needed off-farm sources of income to buy additional land and livestock and to pay their taxes and redemption payments.28 In addition to the widespread rumors that it was possible to earn good wages in southern "pits" (iamki)—a message carried by the increasing number of villagers with firsthand experience—word was spread by re­ cruiters and contractors, whose search for workers took them from the Donbass-Dnepr Bend "to Russia." They went from village to village promising the high wages Donbass-Dnepr Bend mines were compelled to offer.29 In the 1890s, semiskilled factory workers in central Russia typically earned the pitiful sum of 40 to 60 kopecks a day. In contrast, the daily earnings of Donbass-Dnepr Bend miners averaged about 1.25 rubles. The zaboishcbiki, miners who took pick to coal face, usually earned 1.25 to 1.60 rubles a day working piece rate, and at times as much as 2.00 rubles.30 While shunned by the local peasants, Donets Basin coal mining became the favored off-farm source of income in many districts of central Russia. A zemstvo study of villages in the Morshansk district in Tambov province during the early 1880s noted that "many homesteads during the winter were left in the care of women because most of the men in small families and all the able workers of large families went to the mines."31 The Soviet study of the village of Viriatino in the Morshansk district reported that "after 1905 it was a rare peasant homestead that did not have at least one 28 The Donbass-Dnepr Bcnd had relied on workers from outside the region since before the industrialization drive. Annually, for as long as anyone could remember—but on a partic­ ularly significant scale following the emancipation—migrants from the more densely popu­ lated provinces of central Russia went south to the fertile steppe in search of work as agricul­ tural laborers on gentry estates. Since the southern harvest was slightly earlier than that in central Russia, migrant peasants had time both to earn some money and, if they hurried, make it back home in time to help with the completion of their own harvest. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, when industry was expanding in the Donbass-Dnepr Bend, the de­ mand for agricultural laborers began to contract—which helped expand the pool of potential industrial workers. Many of the old gentry estates were breaking up, and peasants, who had less need for hired help, bought much of this land. Those large estates that remained were becoming even bigger, and they increasingly invested in laborsaving machinery (Semenov, "Rostov-na-Donu," p. 281; R. Munting, "Outside Earnings in the Russian Peasant Farm: The Case ofTula Province, 1900-1917,!"Journal if Peasant Studies 3 [1976]: 436). 29 E. S. Kogan, "K voprosu ο formirovanii proletariate ν Donbasse," in Istoriko-bytovye ekspeditni, ed. Pankratova, pp. 77-78; Sula Benet, ed. and trans., The Village of Viriatmo (New York, 1970), pp. 37-38; Gessen, Istoriia^ornorabocbtkh, p. 86. 30 Even those miners working in the most poorly paid but easier and less dangerous auxil­ iary positions—above ground as sorters, for example—earned 80 to 90 kopecks a day (Avdakov, "O merakh," pp. 332, 334; Taskin, "K voprosu ο pnvlechenii," p. 16). 31 N. Romanov, "Kresfianskoc khoziaistvo ν Morshanskom uezde," in Sbornik statisttcheskikh svedenitpo Tambovskoigubemii, vol. 3 (Tambov, 1882), p. 250.

THE LABOR FORCE

47

worker in the mines, and in some villages there were two or three such migrants in every homestead."32 Migrants predominated in the iron and steel mills of the DonbassDnepr Bend in percentages comparable to those in the coal mines. Accord­ ing to the 1897 census, 79 percent of the workers employed by the mills were not Ukrainians.33 While most were Great Russians, the specific origin of Donbass-Dnepr Bend steelworkers varied gready from factory to fac­ tory.34 The relatively small number of Ukrainians who worked in the mills, especially during the summer, were usually either chernorabochie (manual workers) or Avorniki (watchmen and yard-keepers).35 Central Russian peasants generally migrated to Donbass-Dnepr Bend mines and factories in groups known as artels. A small number migrated individually. Artels traditionally were formed from among the young males of one village or district by an organizer, or starosta—an "elder," a peasant with some industrial experience, often someone from a "bettersituated family, which added to the authority of the artel?36 Connected by zemltachestvo, the bond of a common regional background, these groups of anywhere from ten to fifty migrants signed a contract together. In Viriatino, it was traditional for each new member to present the artel with "a bucket of vodka": After an artel had been formed, the leader went in July to the Donbass and made an agreement there with the current administration about the working condi­ tions and housing of his people. The members were called upon to appear at the mine at a certain time and had to find money for their journey. Some migrants were obliged to sell sheep or part of the harvest; others resorted to loans from priests, who sometimes played the village usurers, or from kulaks. In some LnBenet, Village of Vtriatino, pp. 37-38. Other central Russian districts and provinces, from the 1880s to the 1910s, provide similar evidence. According to a 1911 zemstvo study from the Zadonsk district in Voronezh, "the departure of the district's workers to the Donets coal region is very great, encompassing nearly half of the total worker out-migration from the district" (OtkhozMe promysly, pcrcselenchcskoe i bogomol'cheskoe dvizhenie ν Voronezhskoi gubernii ν 1911 godu [Voronezh, 1914], p. 86, cited in Rashin, Formirovanie, p. 445). 33 Ivanov, "Pod"em," p. 356. 34 The Polish and Western European contingent was often considerable. At the Dneprovsk steel factory in the first half of the 1890s, 55 percent of the workers were from Great Russian provinces, 27 percent were from Polish provinces, and only 15 percent were from Ukrainian provinces (manual day laborers are not included in these figures). The remaining 3 percent were foreigners. At the Briansk factory at that time, almost all of the 3,756 workers were from just five provinces: Orel, Kaluga, Smolensk, Tverj, and, to a lesser extent, Vitebsk (Ε. I. Ragozin, Zhelezo i ugol'nalugeRossii [St. Petersburg, 1895], pp. 37—46). 35 Bohdan Krawchenko, Social Change and National Consciousness m Twentieth-Century Ukraine (New York, 1985), p. 43. 36 Benet, Village of Vtriatino, p. 37. For a discussion of artels, see also Reginald E. Zelnik, Labor and Society in Tsarist Russia: The Faaory Workers of St. Petersburg, 1855-1870 (Stanford, 1971); and Johnson, Peasant and Proletarian. 32

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stances, artels as a unit took a loan for all their members under a common voucher.37

At the coal mine, the elder represented the artel before the company man­ agement. The artel representative often conducted all the artel's business, sparing management tasks such as apportioning work assignments and dis­ tributing earnings, even supplying the workers of the artel with "all the necessities: clothes, boots, meals, and, of course, vodka."38 Each member of the artel paid the starosta a part of his earnings. Over time, more and more artel leaders were actually contractors or subcontractors hired by the mine, rather than artel members.39 More often than not, the original artel started to come apart as a working and living unit soon after arriving in the Donbass-Dnepr Bend, with new members constantly replacing old ones. Membership in the artel, however, usually continued to be restricted by place of origin, or zemliachestvo. Migrants strongly preferred to work and live with those they considered their own kind. Workers from different provinces did not mix if they could avoid it. Zemluuhestvo served a positive function by cushioning the move from village to industrial life, but it also divided worker from worker and contributed to the fragmentation of the Donbass-Dnepr Bend working class. Many of the soon-to-be miners and steelworkers arriving from central Russia reached their distant destination in a time-honored fashion: floating down the Dnepr on a handmade raft, or hitching up a cow or horse and riding an old village cart. Some migrants, such as K. I. Rusanov of Orel province, spent weeks traveling long distances on foot. In an oral history, Rusanov later recalled his journey: "After collecting nine rubles I decided to go [south] in search of a living. . . . I went on foot—840 kilometers in twenty-three days. I left New Year's Day and on the 23rd of January 1884 I arrived at the mine."40 With the expansion of the railroad network in the 1880s and the added inducement of specially reduced ticket prices for workers, railroad stations became the gateways to the large DonbassDnepr Bend mines and mills. All year long, one human wave after an­ other—with two tidal waves in the spring and fall—washed ashore at a few key railroad stations. At the Alchevsk station on the Ekaterinin line, for Benet, Village ofViriatino, p. 37. Before the turn of the century, recruiters and contrac­ tors often were able to offer their peasant recruits advances and travel money. Advances in­ creased the number of migrants recruited from central Russia but did not solve the laborshortage problem. The individual Donbass-Dnepr Bend enterprise paying the advance was often left holding the bag. Migrants learned shortly after arriving at a Donets Basin mine that they could switch with impunity to a neighboring mine whose need for workers was equally great and thereby escape working off their debt (Taskin, K voprosu ο privlecbenti, p. 16). 38 Voroshilov, Rasskazy ο zhiznt, p. 131. 39 Crisp, "Labour and Industrialization," p. 377. 40 Quoted in McKay, Pioneers fin· Profit, p. 260. 37

THE LABOR FORCE

49

instance, at peak times of the year hundreds of peasant migrants daily tum­ bled from the arriving third- or fourth-class wagons. By the late nineteenth century, most migrants made the long trip south in these smelly, dirty wag­ ons, in which passengers either sat rightly packed together on the floor or—if they were not so lucky as to find a spot on which to sit—were forced to stand endlessly.41 There was no mistaking the peasant origins of migrant workers when they arrived in the Donbass-Dnepr Bend, clad as most of them were in homemade clothes. Numerous accounts testify to just how poor and rag­ ged these peasant recruits usually appeared. Rusanov recounted how he prepared for his 840-kilometer journey south: "I bought bast [for shoes] and wove it myself. I put two pairs of underclothes and some dried bread in a satchel and I got a walking stick. I put on my coat, a cloth robe covered with sheep's wool—a belt made of twine and a wool cap, and I took off on foot."42 In the central Russian village of Viriatino, informants remember that in the 1880s—1890s, when workers went off to the Donbass for seasonal mining, they left dressed in thick, crudely worked, linen shirts, with coats and pants of the same thick, crude material. They did not even take a change of clothes with them; seven months later they would return to the village in the same outfit, by then dirty and torn. The people used to call this outfit "miners' attire," and it was worn until it was actually falling off their bod­ ies. Instead of the usual slippers, however, they wore leather work boots in the mines.43

By the end of the 1890s, miners were returning in "city clothes": "From the Donbass the miners brought back to the village not only the money they earned but also the clothing they bought. Every young miner tried to buy himself at least one new outfit."44 The weary migrant in search of work who had come south not in an artel but individually was on his own when he arrived. Donbass-Dnepr Bend enterprises were unable to coordinate and systematize the hiring pro­ cess. For a number of reasons, particularly government prohibitions, re­ peated proposals by the Association of Southern Coal and Steel Producers to establish employment offices at railroad stations were never realized. At the Alchevsk station, some of the bedraggled new arrivals would linger in the nearby town of Zhilovsk in an attempt to orient themselves, to discover where workers were needed and where the best conditions could be found. But most just set off immediately to nearby mines in search of employ­ ment. With litde money in their pockets, these newly arrived migrants Ekaterinoslavskii listok, May 3, 1904, p. 2. Quoted in McCaffray, "New Work," p. 108. 43 Benct, Village of Viriatino, p. 84. 44 Ibid.

41

42

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were anxious to find work as soon as possible and usually were not at a loss as to where to start looking. They typically went looking "on the offchance," as they called it, to mines employing their fellow zemliaki, often men from their own village, who almost invariably were able to get them hired. Such contacts were almost a necessity in the mill towns. Unless they were skilled, migrants looking for steady work in the mills usually needed kin to inform them of openings and persuade foremen and other supervi­ sors to hire them. This led to concentrations of zemliaki in particular skill areas and departments of the mill.45 Donbass-Dnepr Bend industrialists failed to mold most of their workers into steady, long-term employees ambitious to raise themselves up through the job hierarchy, so that while recruiting an adequate labor supply was a major problem, retaining workers was an equally serious one.46 Few of the recruited peasants migrated south with the intent of settling there. They generally considered their industrial employment to be temporary and were not inclined to stay long.47 Turnover in the mines was fantastically high, much higher than in the steel mills. Almost every mine suffered from a constant flux in its labor force.48 G. D. Naviazhskii, a zemstvo doctor practicing in the DonbassDnepr Bend, wrote in 1908: Not one mine has a regular contingent of workers. I do not have in mind here those conditions of the marketplace common to all capitalist enterprises—the expansions and contractions of the work force caused by expansions and then contractions of production. No! I am speaking about a specific phenomenon, a peculiarity, apparendy unique to our mines. This phenomenon consists in the fact that the mines do not have any sort of significant contingent of regular work­ ers, workers who remain at one and the same enterprise for a more or less long stretch of time.49

A contemporary German authority on the Donbass-Dnepr Bend work force, O. GoebeL, reported that among the Donbass-Dnepr Bend enter­ prises he investigated, "it was considered fortunate if one-tenth of the work force formed a permanent core."50 Miners typically stayed put for so short 45 G. D. Naviazhskii, "V ozhidanii kholery," Vrachebnaia gazcta, no. 38 (1908): 154; A. L. Smidovich, "Ob organizatsii," p. 751; Kogan, "K voprosu ο formirovanii," pp. 77—78. 46 Hardhr an annual meeting of the Association of Southern Coal and Steel Producers passed in which the problem of worker turnover was not a primary topic for discussion. 47 A. I. Fenin, "Neskol'ko slov ο polozhemi rabochikh na kamennougol'nykh rudnikakh Iuga Rossii," Izvestua obshchestvagornykh inzhenmv 2 (1896): 18. 48 Boikov, "Otchet ο kholemoi epidemii," p. 411. 49 "V ozhidanii kholery," pp. 154—155. 50 O. GoebeL, EntmcHungsgang der russtschen Industriearbeiter bis zur ersten Revolution (Leipzig, 1920), p. 13, quoted in McKay, Pioneers for Pnrfit, p. 247.

THE LABOR FORCE

51

a time that in some Donets Basin mines, up to 80 percent of miners worked just one, two, or three months before picking up and moving on— often simply to try their luck at another mine in the hope that conditions there might be better. In 1896, A. I. Fenin estimated in the national min­ ing engineers' journal that 60 to 70 percent of the coal mining work force completely turned over every two to three years.51 Fenin was complaining, but an estimate that as many as 30 to 40 percent of the region's miners were in relatively permanent jobs was exceptionally high. Naviazhskii stated that the percentage of miners at any particular mine who had been there for over a year was sometimes as low as 2 percent and rarely exceeded 20 percent.52 As late as 1907, the Association of Southern Coal and Steel Producers estimated that the typical Donets Basin miner moved two to two and one-half times during the course of a year.53 Management generally blamed the peasant character of their workers for the high turnover (as would Soviet managers decades later). Indeed, many of the migrants were new to industrial employment as well as to the region; and, as we will see, they wanted to return to agriculture. But one should remember that moving on was one of the few ways workers could express discontent with their working and living conditions in a country where strikes and trade unions were illegal and where legal provisions for the setdement of grievances were almost nonexistent. There was little to discourage miners from exchanging employment at one mine for a job at another or from returning to their village. The con­ tractual agreements binding miner to mine generally went unenforced.54 Nor was it expensive for the typical Donbass-Dnepr Bend migrant worker—young and free of the encumbrance of a family—to move be­ tween mines. As noted above, miners traveled light. Upon settling their account at one mine, miners often simply packed their meager belongings, went to the nearby train station, jumped aboard a passing freight train, and rode the rails to the next station.55 The labor shortage put workers in a relatively strong position. In shortage conditions, employers could do little to discourage job-hopping—and with employers often competing with one another for labor, they unwittingly encouraged it.56 The high turnover rate reflected the fart that the labor shortages that "Neskol'ko slov," p. 18. kholery," p. 156. 53 A. L. Smidovich, "Ob organizatsii," p. 750. 54 Some mines, however, did withhold a half or even an entire month's pay if a worker failed to remain for the length of his contract (Parasun'ko, Pobzhettie i bor'ba, p. 108). 55 Ekaterinoslavskii listok, May 3, 1904, p. 2. 56 Conversely, it is not surprising that turnover declined during the occasional periods when Donbass-Dnepr Bend industry experienced a downturn. The first three years of the twentieth century would prove to be by far the most significant such industrial downturn during the period covered by this study. 51

52 "V ozhidanii

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plagued Donbass-Dnepr Bend mines were largely seasonal. The yearlong swirl of workers moving from one enterprise to another, or to and from the countryside, was just an eddy compared to the two protracted waves of wholesale turnover that broke during the fall and spring.57 Seasonal turnover was so entrenched in Russia that most mines as well as other industries hired workers seasonally, for six-month hitches.58 Easter tradi­ tionally was the end of the fall-winter term. It was then that DonbassDnepr Bend mine operators had the most trouble replacing workers de­ parting to work their own farmsteads or to work as agricultural laborers on southern estates.59 During the summer, as underground shafts became increasingly hot and humid, "all sorts of riff-raff would be made to assem­ ble to keep the mines going. A subcontractor would round up men in the market place from among the 'barefoot ones' [sic] (bosiaki) many of them retired soldiers, the work-shy, the dossers, etc., and would attempt to fash­ ion them into some sort of work gang."60 The persistent appeal of agricultural work highlights the peasant char­ acter of Donbass-Dnepr Bend miners and their lack of identification with their role as workers.61 Donbass-Dnepr Bend coal miners displayed even stronger ties to their rural roots than workers in other industrial regions in Russia. Peasants came to the Donbass-Dnepr Bend to become miners usu­ ally only because mine earnings were considered to be the most expedient way to earn supplementary income for their family's farmstead. The mi­ grants attached great importance to the independence and security they associated with the land, although a minority were glad to leave behind rural life and domineering fathers. Most Donbass-Dnepr Bend miners worked in the mines with the idea of saving money to improve their lot as peasants. That was the impression garnered by the doctor-publicist V. V. Veresaev during his stay in the Don­ bass-Dnepr Bend in the summer of 1890. Illiterate miners often ap­ proached him to read letters they had received or to help them write to their families. What struck Veresaev in the miners' correspondence was their attentiveness and concern with everything relating to their farmstead back in the village—for example, where and how to buy a horse cheaply or the necessity of covering the barn. According to Veresaev, the migrants Potolov, Rabocbte Donbassa, p. 146. Avdakov, "O merakh," p. 331. 59 In the 1870s, the mines themselves were often responsible for seasonal turnover. Most Donbass-Dnepr Bend mines then were still technically too primitive to remain open yearround. Spring rains would raise the water level in underground shafts so high that mining became impossible. Mines were forced to ask all but a few of their workers to leave while the mine was drained (Benet, Village cfViriatino, p. 34). 60 Crisp, "Labour and Industrialization," p. 378. 61 Taskin, K voprosu ο prtvlechcnti, p. 14. 57 58

THE LABOR FORCE

53

"deny themselves necessities while working here in the mines, in order to save needed money—and then go from here, never to return."62 According to most other observers, however, the migrant miners squandered most of what they earned. In any case, for middle-peasant households in central Russian villages, where subsistence agriculture still prevailed, whatever cash could be saved from working seasonally in Donbass-Dnepr Bend mines could go a long way toward buying more catde and land. Donbass-Dnepr Bend miners brought to the central Russian village household some of the niceties of life: "New furnishings were bought, and wooden beds appeared, along with iron pots and pans, tea cups, and plates. All these items were the result of new tastes and new needs acquired during stays at Donbass mines."63 The construction of brick houses in villages where peasants had lived since time immemorial in one-room log huts was the most dramatic change in village life that miners' savings made possible. A new house built with bricks gave the miners' family status within the village, and "for this reason, migratory miners were eager to put the money they earned, before everything else, into building a brick house."64 By the turn of the century, observers noted progress toward the forma­ tion of a core of stable miners (at least by the standards of the DonbassDnepr Bend mining industry)—workers who mined nonstop for more than one full year. But even this minority of so-called long-term miners in most cases had not abandoned their peasant dreams. The attitude of Nikita Khrushchev's parents was typical of long-term mining families in the Don­ bass-Dnepr Bend. In the early years of the twentieth century, they finally abandoned their tiny farmstead in the village of Kalinovka in Kursk prov­ ince and moved into a small house in the Uspenovskii mining village just outside Iuzovka, where for years Nikita's father had journeyed each au­ tumn to work in the mines.65 In his memoirs, Khrushchev recalled how "both my father and my mother, but particularly my mother, dreamed of the day when they could return to the village, to a litde house, a horse, and a piece of land of their own. That's why I lived sometimes with my father at the pit and sometimes with my grandfather in a village in Kursk prov­ ince."66 Like the seasonal workers, long-term miners generally planned to return home; and most actually managed to save, litde by little. Once they 62 V. V. Veresaev, "Podzemnoc tsarstvo," Nedel' (September 1892): 42—43, quoted in Potolov, Rabochie Donbassa, p. 175. 63 Benet, Village cf Vtriatino, p. 39. 64 Ibid., pp. 63-64. 65 P. Bogdanov et al., Rasskaz opochctnom shakhtcre: N. S. KhrushchevvDonbasse (Stalino, 1961), pp. 9-13. 66 N. S. Khrushchev, Khrushchev Remembers, ed. and trans. Strobe Talbott (Boston, 1970), 1:267.

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accumulated a sum sufficient to purchase a farmstead, they immediately headed back to their native village.67 Even steelworkers who had seemingly cut their rural ties often contin­ ued to cherish village dreams after settling their families in the DonbassDnepr Bend and working in the mills continuously for years. Illustrative of this is the history of the Polozhintsev family, as told by a member of the family to historians in the early 1950s. Like Khrushchev, F. I. Polozhintsev was born into peasant poverty in Kursk province. The Polozhintsev family held almost no land. A mere one and one-half desiatines divided into three separate strips was all this family of ten could call its own. PolozhintseVs father managed to lease some additional land by working for his better-off neighbors, but years of barely managing to keep the family fed made the prospect of a job at the New Russia Company's mill in Iuzovka look at­ tractive. Polozhintsev's wife joined him before long to serve as the cook for an artel of twenty workers. It is impossible to know with any precision how common such a move was, but after a few years the Polozhintsev family managed to return to their central Russian village with enough money to build a hut and buy some land and a horse.68 What is clear is that few of the young migrants working in the mines and mills wanted to re­ main for long in the Donbass-Dnepr Bend. In the 1890s, Donbass-Dnepr Bend industrialists finally recognized pub­ licly that working and living conditions at their enterprises bore some re­ sponsibility for workers' unwillingness to stay put for an extended period. Before then, industrialists had simply chosen to blame their high worker turnover on the restlessness of youth and the peasant character of the avail­ able labor force. Donbass-Dnepr Bend miners were indeed young.69 In the Krivoi Rog iron mines, for example, 90 percent of miners were under thirty years old.70 The mining industry insisted that since most DonbassDnepr Bend mines offered relatively good and roughly equivalent wages, their workers could not be continually moving in order to receive higher pay, as some commentators suggested.71 67 I. L. Lisser, "Gomorabochie na zheleznykh rudnikakh Krivorozhskogo raiona," Zhumal Obshchestva russktkh VriuheiTpamtat3N. I. Pirogav, 110. 8 (December 1907): 751. 48 Kogan, "K voprosu ο fbrmirovanii," p. 73. In contrast to the peasant migrants whose move into industry ended with an improved farmstead back in their village, for some migrants the Donbass-Dnepr Bend was just a stopover in a journey that ended with a new life in the industrial centers of the United States, Canada, Brazil, Argentina, or Australia (Caroline Golab, "The Impact of the Industrial Experience on the Immigrant Family: The Huddled Masses Reconsidered," in Immigrants in Industrial America, 1850-1920, ed. Richard L. EhrIich [Charlottesville, Va., 1977], pp. 6-7). 69 Taskin, K voprosu ο privlechenii, p. 9; Lisser, "Gomorabochie," p. 751. 70 Crisp, "Labour and Industrialization," p. 366. 71 Industrialists buttressed their view that monetary incentives did not explain the motiva-

THE LABOR FORCE

55

Industrialists started to make more of an effort in the 1890s to entice workers to settle in the Donbass-Dnepr Bend and quit their nomadic life­ style. The industrialists were well aware that a relatively permanent labor force would never be achieved until miners cut their rural ties and settled in the Donbass-Dnepr Bend, as the annual reports of the Association of Southern Coal and Steel Producers attest. As was noted in chapter 1, es­ pecially primitive living conditions awaited most migrant workers arriving in the new mining settlements and factory towns during the early years of the Donbass-Dnepr Bend industrialization drive. The labor shortage and turnover spawned a competition among the big enterprises to build im­ proved housing during the 1890s. In addition to barracks, industrial com­ panies began to build family housing to try to induce workers to bring their families to live with them. Before the 1890s, few of the young migrants working in the mines and mills considered establishing families in the Donbass-Dnepr Bend. Mar­ ried workers, planning to stay for only a short stretch, left their wives and children behind in their home villages.72 The reasons that workers living with their families in the Donbass-Dnepr Bend proved less transient than workers unencumbered with wives and children are obvious. No longer separated from their families, these married workers had less cause to re­ turn to their native villages. Workers with families were also both more inclined to develop their skills and less likely to roam from mine to mine or mill to mill, especially as they advanced in age. In addition to lowering tions of their peasant recruits by pointing to the counterproductive results of pay hikes. When wages were temporarily raised, workers responded by working less. For evidence, the indus­ trialists referred to the early 1890s, when a particularly severe labor shortage hit the DonbassDnepr Bend and dramatically boosted wages. Then, the more a worker earned per day, the fewer days he worked. Miners were evidently content to earn the monthly income they had come to expect (E. Kolodub, Trud i zfnzn'gomorabochtkh na Grushevskikh antratsitnykh rudnikath, 2d ed. [Moscow, 1907], p. 123; Taskin, K voprosu οprivUcbentt, p. 15). The industri­ alists' assertion should not be rejected out of hand. As such leading labor historians as Herbert Gutman and E. P. Thompson have pointed out in the American and British contexts, people entered industry with preindustrial ideas and work habits that shaped their responses to in­ dustrial life (Herbert G. Gutman, Work, Culture, and Society in Industrializing America: Essays in American Working-Class and Social History [New York, 1977]; E. P. Thompson, "Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism," Past and Present 38 [1967]: 56-97). It should also be noted that although Donbass-Dnepr Bend workers may have been slow to react to financial incentives intended to increase productivity, they were quick to act when wage rates were cut. 72 This was particularly true among the miners in the Krivoi Rog. In the Donets Basin, some miners did live with their families, but not many. Of 1,623 Donets Basin miners sur­ veyed in a zemstvo study in the mid-1880s, only 7.1 percent lived with their families (Potolov, Rabochie Donbassa, p. 147). According to a different source, by the early 1890s the per­ centage had risen to 10 to 15 percent. Only at the oldest mines, such as those of the New Russia Company, did the percentage of miners who had settled their families in the DonbassDnepr Bend approach 20 percent (Gessen, Istoriia gornorabocbikh, p. 133).

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turnover rates, workers with families had other advantages for employers. Saddled with responsibilities, they tended to be less likely than their single, generally younger coworkers to engage in activities related to labor unrest. Furthermore, mine operators or mill directors who had an unusually longterm perspective must have realized that when a worker's family became permanendy settled at a mine, the miners' offspring could also be a future source of settled, skilled workers. Better housing appeared to be an obvi­ ous way to create a more stable, docile, and prolific work force. Donbass-Dnepr Bend industry in the 1890s increasingly spent the cap­ ital necessary to build special family housing. Until then, workers' families generally had been forced to live in mud dugouts—the zemlianki described in chapter 1—or in barracks. Blankets hung up around a bed in the corner commonly provided the only privacy married couples enjoyed in barracks. In the 1890s, relatively comfortable family housing, which ranged from cottages to four-family dwellings, soon began to be a necessity if an enter­ prise hoped to compete with other enterprises trying to establish a more stable and skilled work force. In addition to the shortage of appropriate housing, other considerations discouraged miners from bringing family members to the Donbass-Dnepr Bend—among them the difficulty of supporting a family on a miner's wages. Mining settlements offered women and children little opportunity to work.73 Steel mills also had few jobs for women, but the wives of met­ allurgical workers had a much better chance of finding employment in the cities and towns where steel mills were located.74 It is not necessary to dig 73 Lisser, "Gornorabochie," pp. 755—756. While underemployment was the rule in central Russian villages, at least all able-bodied members of the household a miner left behind could presumably support themselves. Donbass-Dnepr Bend mining villages, however, were quint­ essential one-industry towns. Miners generally did not earn enough to support a family, and mines employed female labor to a very limited extent; and women were not eligible for work inside the mine shafts. And while a miner's wife might be lucky enough to secure one of the few aboveground mine jobs, such as sorting, a worker had almost no hope of finding work at a mine for any females other than his wife. Rather than working for the mine, a more likely and better source of income for a miner's wife was to serve as the cook, laundress, and house­ keeper for her husband's artel (Kolodub, Trud izhtzn', p. 124; I. N. Kavalerov, "O polozhenii bol'nykh zhenshchin-chlenov semeistv gornorabochikh na rudnikakh, zavodakh i drugikh promyshlennykh predpriiatiiakh, raspolozhennykh ν raione Bakhmutskogo uezda Ekaterinoslavskoi gubernii," Trudy IX ptrqgovskogo s"czda 4 [1905]: 406). Regarding juvenile mem­ bers of the family, the law prohibited mines from employing those under the age of seventeen, although such laws commonly went unenforced. Fathers sometimes could obtain work at the mines even for their very young sons. The father of Kliment Voroshilov, the future military and political leader, found his then seven-year-old son employment inside a Donets Basin pit gathering pyrites for ten kopecks a day (Voroshilov, Rasskazy ο zhiznt, p. 27). 74 Women worked, for example, in the small manufacturing shops that supplied the ma­ chine shops with "hinges, loops, spikes, wire sieves, and bolts" (Crisp, "Labour and Industri­ alization," p. 357).

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very deep to uncover other reasons miners and steelworkers felt settling their families in the Donbass-Dnepr Bend was undesirable. As will be dis­ cussed in some detail in chapter 3, to enter Donbass-Dnepr Bend work­ ing-class life was to enter an overwhelmingly male environment, a rough world in which drinking, gambling, prostitution, and fighting were the social norm. Family life left much to be desired, no doubt even in compar­ ison with what was left behind in the hardly idyllic central Russian village. One mine manager drew this lurid picture of a miner's family life in the Donbass-Dnepr Bend: Fathers, worn out from their backbreaking work in the mine and aware of their inability to in any way brighten their family's life, for the most part do not bring earnings home. Instead they squander them on drink. The children—neglected, half-naked, and perpetually hungry—"earn their living" through petty thievery. Not a small percent of them, upon reaching legal age, do not change their views about the inviolability of other people's property.75

Journalists who ventured into the mining setdements presented a similarly depressing picture. Despite mining enterprises' increased investments in housing, a journalist such as P. Surozhskii could still report in 1913 after a visit to the Briansk mines that "for those with families there was terrible overcrowding, deprivation, sick and querulous wives, and puny, emaciated children."76 Some Donbass-Dnepr Bend mining industrialists became so exasper­ ated with their labor shortages that they decided to try to capitalize on their workers' preference for farming. Firms began to offer workers a small plot of land, usually adjacent to a worker's residence, if they settled at the mine with their families. Garden plots allowed a family to grow its own vegetables and provided a profitable activity in which a miner's wife and children could participate. Raising chickens and cattle even became possible.77 Kolodub, Trud izhizn', pp. 124—125. P. Surozhskii, "Krai uglia i zheleza," Sovremenntk, no. 4 (1913): 308, quoted in W. Bruce Lincoln, Passage through Armageddon: The Russians in War and Revolution, 1914-1918 (New York, 1986), p. 223. 77 The offer of land was the most radical and promising measure the mining industry tried in its attempt to establish a stable contingent of skilled miners. It was not, however, a novelty in Russia; mines in the Urals, long before the end of serfdom, granted plots of land to miners with families. Donbass-Dnepr Bend firms hoped miners would feel that they could have the best of both worlds—the income that mining made possible combined with a domestic situ­ ation reminiscent of village life. Furthermore, industrialists hoped that household farming would bring not only a more stable and experienced work force, but a more sober and disci­ plined one as well—that working garden plots would divert workers from the drunken revelry and violence in which they customarily indulged during their leisure time (Taskin, K voprosu ο pnvlechenit, pp. 14—15; TsGIA, f. 23, op. 30, d. 47, p. 85). The minister of finance, Sergei 75

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Worker garden plots never became widespread, but by the end of the century most of the bigger mines had built such amenities as chapels, hos­ pitals, schools, and libraries in addition to housing, to encourage workers to think twice before leaving. As we saw in chapter 1, firms constructed comfortable housing for their more skilled workers to encourage these workers to settle down at the mine or factory. In the 1890s, the turnover rate in the Donbass-Dnepr Bend did begin to decrease. Even so, on the eve of 1905, the percentage of workers who had settled down with a family at a Donbass-Dnepr Bend enterprise was still low and turnover remained staggeringly high. Although the mills enjoyed considerably more success than the mines in establishing a stable core within their labor force, indus­ trialists still felt they had not made much headway toward establishing a stable work force. The Donbass-Dnepr Bend labor force continued to consist largely of young male migrants fresh from the countryside. Not unlike recruits initi­ ated into industrial production elsewhere, the workers were ill prepared by life in the village and its agrarian work habits to become disciplined cogs in the wheels of Donbass-Dnepr Bend industry. It was a repellent environ­ ment in which the newly hired worker found himself when he went to work in the dark pits of the mines or in the cavernous, red-hot furnace sheds and rolling shops of the mills. As their outbursts of discontent will at least partly attest to, many in this motley labor force found it difficult to make the adjustment to mine and mill labor. The distinctive manner in which the Donbass-Dnepr Bend working class formed—or, more precisely, the manner in which it was continually being Witte, was among those quick to point out the basic obstacle to the wide implementation of this plan. Most Donbass-Dnepr Bend mining enterprises could not provide workers with land for the simple reason that their mines were located on leased land (TsGIA1 f. 37, op. 58, d. 299 [Dnemik komissiiA. A. Sbtrfa], p. 89; TsGIA, f. 23, op. 30, d. 47 [ministry of finance report, December 9, 1899], p. 93). Nobles and peasant communes both commonly refused to offer interested corporations and entrepreneurs the option of purchasing the land they wanted to mine. Most enterprises were forced to sign thirty-six-year leases. These leases also discouraged enterprises from building more substantial worker housing. But even when firms owned the land on which their mines were located or when they worked out an arrangement with the owners, other snags in this labor-relations scheme quickly became apparent. Lack of water made plot cultivation difficult. Also, the amount of land allotted often failed to satisfy workers. If the scheme was to succeed in settling workers at a mine for the long term and on a large scale, plots granted by mines could not be perceived by workers as mere tokens; they had to serve as substitutes for what the workers in reality—or just in their hopes and dreams— thought they were abandoning in their native villages. But mine operators had no interest in offering miners truly viable pieces of farmland. From the perspective of the mining industry, granting miners the sort of plots they wanted would have been a cure worse than the disease. Mine operators perhaps justifiably feared that if they granted larger plots, the peasant-workers would devote their energy and time more to farming than to mining (TsGIA, f 37, op. 58, d. 299 [Dnemik komissiiA. A. Shtofa], pp. 88-89).

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formed—helped shape the Donbass-Dnepr Bend labor movement in many ways. Transience and the lack of a long-term commitment to their jobs prevented many workers from developing a working-class conscious­ ness in the Donbass-Dnepr Bend, as elsewhere, although in switching jobs frequently some migrants gained a sense of the bigger picture. One radical intelligent active in the region noted that the "railway stations, so empty elsewhere in Russia, are like bazaars here. In 3rd class coaches the talk is of the latest strike, and of how the contractors and technical staff and the police rob the workers."78 More important, the industrialists' recruiting difficulties gave workers in the Donbass-Dnepr Bend a sense of power. Skill was a cherished commodity in short supply in the region. But even the least-skilled mass of workers—namely, the miners—were also in short supply. When business was booming and jobs went begging, DonbassDnepr Bend workers did not feel as dispensable and were not as easy to intimidate as workers elsewhere in Russia. The managers of the DonbassDnepr Bend's steel mills and coal mines generally were more dependent on the goodwill of their workers than were employers elsewhere. But the fact that the work force was in a constant state of flux made organizing difficult for labor activists.

Jews employed in artisanal shops constituted the third major group of workers in the Donbass-Dnepr Bend, after the skilled factory and railroad workers and the miners and semiskilled or unskilled factory workers. Al­ though they rarely appear in the available primary sources and Soviet his­ tories, Jewish artisans played a large role in the Donbass-Dnepr Bend la­ bor and revolutionary movements, as well as in the backlashes their involvement in these movements helped provoke. Most artisans in the Donbass-Dnepr Bend worked as tailors, shoemak­ ers, seamstresses, cap-makers, watchmakers, locksmiths, and bakers, and the overwhelming majority of them were Jewish. Basic statistical informa­ tion on Donbass-Dnepr Bend artisans is scarce, but already by 1891 gov­ ernment investigators had counted 38,598 artisans in Ekaterinoslav prov­ ince alone.79 A large number of Jews also worked as salesclerks in the retail shops selling the artisans' wares or in other shops. During the 1890s, the small-scale sector of the economy continued to grow, albeit much more slowly than heavy industry. Jews, even new arrivals, rarely worked in the booming industries that had drawn Great Russians to the Donbass-Dnepr Bend. As one contem78 Lcvus, "Iz istorii rcvoliutsionnogo dvizhcniia ν Donetskim basseme," Narodttoe delo, no. 3 (1909): 44, quoted in Friedgut, Iuzovka and Revolution, p. 66. 79 TsGIA, f. 1284, 1892, op. 223, d. 202, p. 80.

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porary, the Labor Zionist writer Ber Borochov, noted with rhetorical flourish: The Jewish worker is kept away from the main moving power of the contem­ porary economy—from big industry. Neither in the depth of mines, nor by the burning furnace and not by the steam engine was his combative spirit and his class consciousness forged. In the narrow, suffocating shop, on the low stool, by the modest workbench were his aspirations born. Not in the smoke and noise of the factory was his body steeled to bear the hardships of struggle, but in the soot of small oil lamps and in the dampness of cellars.80

It was not the refusal of religious Jews to break the Sabbath rest and work on Saturday, as the socialist press in the Pale of Setdement asserted, that primarily accounts for why Jews entered artisanal rather than industrial occupations. This was especially true in the Donbass-Dnepr Bend, where Jews tended to be less religious than Jews in other parts of the Pale.81 Some historians suggest industrial employers, including Jews, refused to hire members of the Jewish lower classes because physically they compared un­ favorably with migrant Great Russian peasants or because they had a rep­ utation for militance.82 But the Jewish absence in the mills and mines of the Donbass-Dnepr Bend seems to have been a matter more of Jewish choice than of employer discrimination. As was the case with most Ukrai­ nian peasants (and this may be all the two groups had in common), Jews acted on their aversion to industrial labor by refusing to work in mills and mines.83 While social status in the Jewish community generally coincided with income, industrial workers were the major exception. Jews placed such a premium on independence that even relatively well paid factory workers occupied the bottom of the social ladder.84 Yet Jewish artisans themselves were becoming rapidly proletarianized. Not only did Jewish artisans gen­ erally earn less and work longer hours than their counterparts in the indus­ trial work force (although conditions were better in the Donbass-Dnepr Bend than in the northwestern provinces of the Pale), for apprentices and journeymen the dream of becoming a master and making the transition from employee to employer was becoming increasingly difficult to realize as artisanal production had to face ever-increasing competition from 80 Quoted in Yoav Peled, Class and Ethnicity in the Pale: The Political Economy of Jewish Workers' Nationalism in Late Imperial Russia (New York, 1989), p. xii. 81 Ibid., p. 85. 82 Ibid., pp. 75, 116. 83 On the absence of Jews in industry in the Pale generally, see Ezra Mendelsohn, Class Struggle in the Pale (Cambridge, England, 1970), p. 20; and Peled, Class and Ethnicity, p. 28. 84 Arcadius Kahan, Essays in Jewish Soctal and Economic History, ed. Roger Weiss (Chicago, 1986), pp. 26-27.

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larger-scale, technically superior factories. The owners of artisanal work­ shops, for their part, were not much better off than their employees.85 Jew­ ish master craftsmen themselves often enjoyed only the appearance of in­ dependence. To eke out a livelihood, they and their families often worked on a consignment basis and joined whatever employees they hired in work­ ing long, long hours. The small workshops were patriarchal, often oppressively so, and they paid but a fraction of what Russian workers earned in the large factories or even the mines of the Donbass-Dnepr Bend. A master craftsman com­ monly employed only one or two underlings, rarely more than a dozen; so while in some shops strong friendships formed between employer and em­ ployee, in others journeymen and apprentices were constantly under their master's thumb and were often subjected to the financially squeezed mas­ ter's insults, if not blows. Although artisans became increasingly assertive and politically active away from work, keeping their jobs no doubt de­ pended on taking their lumps without protesting. Given the labor surplus in the Donbass-Dnepr Bend Jewish communities, masters often treated the apprentices they hired as if they were servants, providing them with little opportunity to learn their crafts—a common complaint of apprentices swept up in the radical fervor of the 1905 Revolution.86 The generally young, single males employed in artisanal workshops typ­ ically ate and slept cheek by jowl in the same dark and dingy room where they spent as many as fourteen hours per day working. While it is difficult to imagine that the working and living conditions endured by most jour­ neymen and apprentice artisans in the Donbass-Dnepr Bend could have been worse than those endured by miners and blast-furnace hands, they may have been, even though the typical workshop employee was more skilled and better educated than his industrial counterpart.87 In 1905 workers in small, labor-intensive manufactories presented demands to im­ prove an almost-unbelievable plight. For example, coopers—workers who made and repaired barrels and casks—demanded that instead of their eighteen-hour workday, a twelve-hour day be established and that their monthly wages of eight to ten rubles be increased to fifteen to twenty rubles.88 85 Sbomik materialov ob ekonomtckcskom polozhenti evreev ν Rossii, 2 vols. (St. Petersburg, 1904); Peled, Class and Ethnicity, p. 36. 86 TsGIA f. 1282, d. 463 (Ekaterinoslav governor's annual report, 1900), pp. 6-7. Ap­ 1 prentices were usually under fourteen years of age when they began their apprenticeship (Isaac M. Rubinov, The Economic Condition of the Jews in Russta [New York, 1907], p. 524). 87 Rubinov, Economic Condition; Lalaiants, "O moikh vstrechakh," p. 60; Mendelsohn, Class Struggle, p. 60; Weinberg, "Worker Organizations." 88 Pridneprovskii krai, June 20, 1905, p. 4. By the late nineteenth century, most DonbassDnepr Bend industrial workers worked a ten-hour day, with an eight to nine-hour day on Saturdays and the eve of holidays (TsGLA, f. 37, op. 58, d. 306, p. 118).

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Thus, though they rarely took jobs as industrial workers, Jews came to constitute a large part of the urban population in the Donbass-Dnepr Bend. Artisans and the mass of peddlers, as well as old-clothes dealers, street sellers of fruit and trinkets, repairmen and odd-jobbers, and mer­ chants and their salesclerks were largely Jewish. Many professionals were Jewish as well. Jews accounted for an especially large share of the popula­ tion—35 percent in 1897—in Ekaterinoslav, the oldest, largest, and eco­ nomically most diverse city in the Donbass-Dnepr Bend.89 Even in Iuzovka—the quintessential Donbass-Dnepr Bend industrial company town—one-fifth of the residents were Jewish.90 In the small mining vil­ lages, as throughout the Donbass-Dnepr Bend, Jews owned most of the stores, inns, and taverns.91 As for the native ethnic population, we have seen that Ukrainians were a distinct minority in the working class and in the industrial cities and towns of the Donbass-Dnepr Bend. At the turn of the century, Ukrainians constituted only 16 percent of the population in Ekaterinoslav and ac­ counted for only 21 percent of mill workers and 22 percent of miners.92 In addition, many of the Ukrainian workers either tried to hide their Ukrai­ nian identity or had become Russianized. The frustrations of the tiny Marxist Ukrainian nationalist movement illustrate this. As one Ukrainian Social Democratic Labor party activist complained in 1906: 'The Ukrai­ nian proletariat has become so Russianized that members of the Party working among them must first teach them the Ukrainian language."93 Russian was the language used in the few schools and books to which workers had access. The usual social gulf separating town and countryside during rapid in­ dustrialization was significandy widened in the Donbass-Dnepr Bend by ethnic cleavages. The ethnic composition of industrial cities and towns stood in sharp contrast to that of the surrounding countryside. While the statisticheskii komitet Ministerstva vnutrennikh del, Pervaia vseobshchaia perepis'naseleniia Rassiiskot imperii, 1897g., vol. 13, Ekaterinoslavskaiagubemiia, ed. N. A. Troinitskii (St. Petersburg, 1904), pp. 119,127. By 1904,40 percent of EkaterinoSlav5S population was Jewish (Tsentrai'nyi statisticheskii komitet Ministerstva vnutrennikh del, Goroda Rossii, p. 391). 90 According to a New Russia Company report, in 1913 only 14,000 of Iuzovka's 43,000 residents did not work for the company in one capacity or another. Of these 14,000 residents, 12,000 were Jewish (cited in Friedgut, Iuzovka and Revolution, pp. 86-87). 91 TsGIA, f. 37, op. 58, d. 305, p. 298. Jews controlled the traffic in liquor throughout the Pale until state liquor stores were introduced at the end of the nineteenth century to replace privately owned taverns (Rogger, Jerpish Policies, pp. 147-150, 156). 92 Ivanov, "Pod"em," p. 356; Tsentrai'nyi statisticheskii komitet Ministerstva vnutrennikh del, Goroda Rossii, pp. 210-211. 93 Institut Marksizma-Leninizma pri TsK KPSS, Chetvertyi (ob"edinitePnyi) s"ezd RSDRP, aprel' (aprel'-mai) 1907goda: Protokoly, p. 33, quoted in Elwood, Russtan Social Democracy, p. 89 Tsentrai'nyi

10.

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63

villages remained almost purely Ukrainian, the cities became primarily Great Russian and Jewish. The native rural Ukrainian population, except for those individuals who benefited financially, might be expected to have resented the flood of newcomers. And indeed, the local Ukrainian peasants regarded miners and Jews with particular suspicion and contempt and viewed the wealth and power of the urban centers with hostility and envy. The Bolshevik V. Skorovstanskii concisely summarized how he thought ethnic differences aggravated the Ukrainian peasants' unfavorable view of the city: 'The city is aristocratic, foreign, not ours, not Ukrainian. Russian, Jewish, Polish—only not ours, not Ukrainian."94 Thus, one important consequence of the mass migration into the Don­ bass-Dnepr Bend was the unusual diversity of the work force and of the industrial cities and towns; in addition to Russians, Ukrainians, and Jews, there were sizable contingents of Belorussians and Poles and more than a smattering of Greeks, Gypsies, Tatars, and Turks. This heterogeneity meant that in addition to the usual difference between skilled and un­ skilled, there were other significant lines of cleavage among workers in the Donbass-Dnepr Bend. Ethnic heterogeneity and differences in regional origins balkanized each enterprise's labor force and impeded workers' developing sense of class consciousness. To a large extent, the skilled ranks at many steel plants con­ sisted of foreigners, paid much higher wages and offered much nicer hous­ ing than their Russian and Ukrainian counterparts. Such perquisites were necessary to lure foreign workers away from their native countries to a backwater such as the Donbass-Dnepr Bend. Even the Great Russian in­ dustrial workers lacked a shared identity. With few skills and with little inclination to abandon farming and setde in the Donbass-Dnepr Bend, central Russian migrants brought with them a strong sense of their zemliak identity, their identity as a member of one of a variety of distinct regional groupings. "What a variety of tribes, dialects, sensibilities!" is how P. Smidovich, a radical intellectual activist, characterized the southern metallur­ gical labor force with which he worked and lived.95 The origin of the pre­ dominant group of workers varied from factory to factory and from mine to mine, but at seemingly every firm diversity led to clannishness rather than assimilation. The migrants brought with them the villager's suspicion of strangers and outsiders. Regional origins were rarely forgotten and were an integral feature of working-class life in the Donbass-Dnepr Bend, ex­ cept perhaps among that small percentage of the work force that made the V. Skorovstanskii [V. Shakhrai], Revoliutsiia na Ukraine (Saratov, 1919), pp. 7—8, quoted in Krawchenko, Social Change, p. 20. 95 "Rabochie massy," p. 167. 94

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Donbass-Dnepr Bend its permanent new home and not just a place to make some money before moving on. One aspect of the Donbass-Dnepr Bend's industrial boom that brought these diverse workers together and that helps explain why labor-management relations proved to be especially antagonistic in the region was the foreign ownership and management of most of the large enterprises. Most of the top administrators and, initially, most of the foremen had Western European backgrounds, were unable to speak Russian, and treated their workers with haughtiness. All this fed working-class xenophobia and cre­ ated an explosive situation.96 Members of the government could have no excuse for not being acutely aware of it. In 1900, for example, Ekaterinoslav province's senior factory inspector, S. Aksenov, repeatedly filed reports in which he expressed his concern over how foreign administrators viewed and treated Donbass-Dnepr Bend workers. In his major report for the year, Aksenov stated that the foreign administrators "detest or abhor Rus­ sian workers and often do not acknowledge their basic human rights. The workers pay them in their own coin. In this there is not the slightest exag­ geration."97 On those occasions when the foreign directors tried to learn more about working conditions than what they could see from their office windows, they often did so through Jewish translators, which only made matters worse—for, as we will see, Jews were the one group most workers resented more than foreigners. Aksenov goes on to note that while the foreign directors were ultimately responsible, it was the foreign foremen they hired who often directly provoked worker discontent: The directors always choose and evaluate foremen on the basis of their special­ ized knowledge. They completely disregard the level of their intellectual and moral development. Not many of these foremen speak even broken Russian; all most of them know in Russian are strong curses and some technical terms, or they are unable to speak Russian at all and communicate solely through mimicry. At the same time, since they are terribly uncultured, rude, and in most cases immoral, the worst foreign foremen are extremely familiar in their relations with Russian workers, as are the directors. They slight them in every way possible, swearing and often beating them; in the event an individual worker protests, foremen quickly, and without even attempting to mask their arbitrariness, im­ pose various punitive measures: depriving the worker of his day's wages, down­ grading his piecework, fining him for all sorts of arbitrary reasons.98 96 Native engineers and spokesmen for the foreign-owned Donbass-Dnepr Bend coal and steel industries had perhaps become predominate by the end of the nineteenth century. Men whose surnames were Jewish, German, Polish, French, or English constituted just under half of the delegates at the 1905 meeting of the Association of Southern Coal and Steel Producers (McCaffray, "The Association," pp. 466-467). 97 Quoted in Berkhin, Luganskata bol'shcvistskaia organizatsiia, p. 8. 98 Ibid.

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Shared hostility to foreign bosses should not be exaggerated, however. Ethnic and regional animosities within the working class, coupled with the transient character of the work force, played a crucial role in shaping the Donbass-Dnepr Bend labor movement. The variety of backgrounds among industrial workers and artisans limited the appeal of collective ac­ tion and posed obstacles to solidarity and organization within worker ranks. One searches in vain for evidence to support Lenin's pronounce­ ment that the industrial boom in the Donbass-Dnepr Bend was serving the historically progressive function of assimilating the Great Russian and Ukrainian proletariat: "Capitalism is putting in the place of the dull, toilhardened, settled, beastly Great Russian or Ukrainian peasant a mobile proletariat, whose living conditions break down the national narrowmindedness of both the Great Russians and Ukrainians."99 Smidovich— who, unlike Lenin and other emigre radical intettigenty, was actually trying to organize Donbass-Dnepr Bend workers—recognized, much to his cha­ grin, that "life still has not assimilated them, has not given factory workers' lives a common coloration[,] . . . a consciousness of their common inter­ ests."100 Workers clearly did have much in common, but despite Marxist theory and agitators' hopes, a unified working class was not automatically forged by shared workplace experiences or shared economic status. Worker transience and regional and ethnic prejudices interfered with cohesion. Anti-Semitism was rife among Donbass-Dnepr Bend miners and met­ allurgical workers. It was a rare worker whose personal experiences prompted him to question his ethnic prejudices. When the then-young worker Kliment Voroshilov arrived in Lugansk, on the run from the po­ lice, he hid out in the large, poor household of a Jewish tailor. In his mem­ oirs, Voroshilov recounted how the family's solicitude and kindness led him to ponder "who profits from setting Russian workers against Jewish workers, from the organization of pogroms and the inflaming of anti-Semitic passions." Voroshilov concluded that "this profits only the industri­ alists and the tsarist police, who fear most of all the solidarity of workers of different nationalities."101 Be that as it may, at times anti-Semitism seemed to be the only unifying force within the ranks of industrial workers. These features—workers' shallow roots in the region, rapid turnover, and ethnic heterogeneity—gave the Donbass-Dnepr Bend labor force its particular character and would help distinguish the labor movement there from movements in the northern capitals and other industrial cities. As we will see in the next chapter, the social context in which the Donbass-Dnepr Quoted in Ivanov, "Pod"em," p. 356. massy," p. 167. 101 Rasskazy ο ztnzni, pp. 117-118.

99

100 "Rabochie

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Bend work force formed also shaped the labor movement. Rapid growth in this isolated agrarian region, coupled with the preponderance of male migrants fresh from the countryside, created industrial centers in the Don­ bass-Dnepr Bend that in many ways resembled the wild frontier towns of the nineteenth-century American West.

3 Working-Class Daily Life The Russian mine worker leads a generally drunken life, wallowing in filth. . . . The mine owner cannot change such a way of life as the worker leads—it is beyond his powers. (Director of the Bogodukhov-Kalmius mine) Anyone who knows the present life of miners and factory workers in the Donets Basin . . . will understand the hatred and bitterness diat has been amassed in the chests of this 160,000 man army and all those irrepressible waves of riots that have rolled over the mining and metallurgical regions of the South. (1903 report of the SD's Donets Union)

THE DONBASS-DNEPR BEND labor movement reflected the everyday ex­ periences of working-class life, both on and off the job, in factory cities and mine settlements. Donbass-Dnepr Bend industrial cities and towns had "a kind of rough-and-ready, boom-town atmosphere which had no parallel anywhere else in the empire."1 Workers worked and lived in a world from which alcohol, gambling, prostitutes, and fighting provided the main es­ capes. In the rest of the country, most skilled workers, including those who recognized that change was impossible without class solidarity, felt con­ tempt for the mass of workers, whom they considered uncouth and rowdy slackers. But in the Donbass-Dnepr Bend, it was difficult even for literate, skilled workers to, in the words of Tim McDaniel, "measure up to the conscious workers' new conception of the dignity of the working class."2 Uplifting cultural or educational alternatives to the taverns were in short supply in the region's steel towns and pit villages. When labor unrest erupted in riots and pogroms, many in the Donbass-Dnepr Bend, includ­ ing revolutionaries, were inclined to blame the degrading charaaer of Donbass-Dnepr Bend industrial life and workers' ignorance and dissolute­ ness. 1 2

Richer, Merchants and Entrepreneurs, p. 222. Autocracy, Capitalism, and Revolution, p. 206.

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The large concentrations of workers in isolated places where they con­ stituted the largest social group fostered well-founded fears in government circles that if unrest erupted, it could quickly escalate to uncontrollable dimensions. Few cities anywhere in Russia matched the concentrated in­ dustrial character of towns and cities in the Donbass-Dnepr Bend. In Do­ nets Basin mining settlements, three-fourths of the inhabitants worked in the mines in 1905. More than half the households in the steel towns of Iuzovka and Lugansk had at least one member employed in heavy indus­ try.3 In these cities and towns, most of the residents not employed in the factories or mines made a living catering in some way to working-class needs and tastes. The mostly Jewish shopkeepers, pawnbrokers, and own­ ers and employees of taverns all served a predominantly working-class cli­ entele.4 In these cities, innumerable taverns and liquor stores sought to meet workers' prodigious demand for cheap alcohol. Less conspicuously, many residents illegally sold liquor out their door. And since most workers were single, or separated from the wives left behind in the village, prosti­ tution thrived in the boomtowns. A landlord could transform his building into a brothel with a small investment paid under the table to the police, who were more than willing to supplement their meager salaries with such bribes. As the earlier discussion of the haphazard growth of industrial towns in the Donbass-Dnepr Bend might have suggested, the governmental system in tsarist Russia was poorly equipped to moderate the political, social, and economic strains resulting from rapid industrialization and urbanization. Local government was little developed. City governments generally lacked the funds necessary to provide many of the most basic services because the central government restricted their power to tax property. Within this na­ tional context, a legal quirk left many industrial cities and settlements in the Donbass-Dnepr Bend even further disadvantaged. The autocracy failed to grant most of the new factory and mining centers in the DonbassDnepr Bend, despite populations in the tens of thousands, the legal status of a city, depriving them of the right to elect a city council, a duma.5 The Formtravanie, p. 511; Nikolaenko, Revoliutsionnoe dvizhenie, p. 3; Zaitsev, "Bol'sheviki Iuzovki," p. 156. iBntish Documents on Foreign Affairs: Reports and Papers from the Foreign Office, part 1, series A, vol. 2, Russia, 1881-1905, ed. Domenic Lieven (Frederick, Md., 1982), p. 1. 5 Iuzovka, for example, despite a population of over forty thousand in 1905, was not rec­ ognized as a city until the 1917 Revolution. Robert Lewis and Richard Rowland have noted that in the 1897 census, "thirty-five predominately mining and manufacturing centers with populations between 15,000 and 41,000 were not included in the urban population," while "very small uezd centers, which were little more than agricultural villages, were considered urban" (Robert A. Lewis and Richard Rowland, "Urbanization in Russia and the U.S.S.R., 1897-1966," Annals of the Association of American Geographers 59 [December 1969]: 778; 3Rashin,

WORKING-CLASS DAILY LIFE

69

central government entrusted bureaucrats appointed by the governor with the governance of these towns.6 Even many of these bureaucrats acknowl­ edged in departmental reports that the failure to respond to major demo­ graphic changes meant that in boomtowns many of the most basic public services often were lacking or grossly neglected.7 Donbass-Dnepr Bend factory districts, including EkaterinoslaVs, lacked even the most elementary sanitary facilities—running water and a sewerage system.8 For their water, most residents of industrial districts were forced to rely on wells, reservoirs, or rivers, which were often contaminated by industrial waste.9 Cats, rats, and mice were fished out of the reservoirs and other drinking-water sources that served some working-class districts.10 A good share of the uneducated migrant workers were not equipped to pro­ tect their health in such unsanitary conditions. Accustomed to village life, they did not heed warnings to boil water. Many persisted in going to the river to quench their thirst, as they had in their home villages. In addition to the poor water supply, in working-class districts densely filled with shan­ ties, the only latrines were cesspools or outhouses. The workers themselves often had to build their own latrines; they commonly lacked doors, and by all appearances they were never cleaned.11 The outhouses built by Don­ bass-Dnepr Bend mines to serve their worker barracks almost universally struck investigators as disgusting. To minimize sanitary problems, the mines located outhouses fifty to eighty steps from the barracks. Many workers responded by choosing not to make the trip. Excrement com­ monly littered the grounds. Conditions were not much cleaner indoors, where garbage could be seen lying everywhere.12 Given the combination of overcrowded housing and bad sanitation, along with diets barely adequate nutritionally and workers' debilitatingly Roger L. Thiede,"Industry and Urbanization in New Russia from 1860 to 1910," in Hamm1 The City in Russian History, pp. 125-126). 6 In reality, company managers generally dominated company towns. 7TsGIA, f. 1282, 1901, op. 3, d. 463 (IzvUchenie iz vsepoddattneishego otcbcta za 1900g. ο sostoianii Ekaterinoslavskoigubcrnii), p. 5;Michael F. Hamm1 "The Breakdown ofUrban Mod­ ernization: A Prelude to the Revolutions of 1917," in Hamm, The Ctty in Russian History, p. 196. 8 EkaterinoSlavjS city duma, which was the Donbass-Dnepr Bend's biggest and bestfunded city government, was able to make a serious effort to meet the rapidly growing de­ mand for city services. Ekaterinoslav was able to increase its budget as the city grew during the last half of the nineteenth century, from 95,000 rubles in 1870 to 1,028,500 rubles in 1905. But even in Ekaterinoslav, the city administration provided only a minimum of public sanitation and safety services. 9 Tatarskii, "Otchet ob epidemii," p. 381; Pridneprovskii krai, March 28, 1900, p. 3. 10 See, for example, the report regarding the reservoir that served the Mariia coal mine's settlement (Syn otechestva, October 29,1905, p. 5). 11 Cheremukhin, "Kak zhivut," p. 2; Fenin, "Neskol'ko slov," p. 26. 12 Vartminskii, "K voprosu ο zhilishchnykh usloviiakh," p. 504.

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heavy labor, it should not be surprising to find that Donbass-Dnepr Bend working-class districts were disease-ridden. One contemporary study com­ pared the prevalence of disease among peasants and miners in Ekaterinoslav province in 1908: "No one would argue that peasants live in good conditions . .. and peasants have a much larger percentage of people more susceptible to illness (children, the elderly, women) than miners, who con­ sist largely of adult males. Yet figures show that illness among miners (leav­ ing aside accidents) was two to three times higher than among peasants."13 Typhus and cholera epidemics repeatedly swept through Donbass-Dnepr Bend working-class populations. When such an epidemic struck, the au­ thorities, who had done so little to prevent these disasters, often responded in a manner that aggravated working-class anxieties and animosities. The classic example of local-government mismanagement in the face of a health crisis occurred in Iuzovka during the 1892-93 cholera epidemic. When cholera—"the disease of the poor and hungry, the ignorant and su­ perstitious, the symbol of backwardness"14—struck hundreds of the city's workers after first appearing in the neighboring mines, police and Cossacks quickly cordoned off Iuzovka's factory districts. This measure greatly agi­ tated the miners, who, in addition to seeing fellow workers inexplicably stricken with the fatal scourge, were thereby deprived of access to the only major marketplaces in the area and cut off from friends who lived in the city. Within Iuzovka itself, workers grew increasingly agitated. In addition to the quarantine, the police, on orders from the local authorities, hastily began to demolish the unsanitary outhouses, confiscated the possessions of cholera victims and disinfected their residences, and prohibited the sale of any vegetables or fruits. All these preventive measures were imple­ mented in a high-handed manner: the police failed to explain to the fearful workers why such measures were necessary. Making matters worse, un­ founded rumors quickly spread through the working-class population. It was rumored, for example, that the cost of the temporary cholera barracks and special teahouses (chainye) being constructed would be deducted from workers' wages. Doctors were said to be treating cholera victims inhu­ manely. Because the anxiety and provocation resulting from the epidemic was coupled with workers' general discontent with their working and liv­ ing conditions, the sending of a worker's sick wife to a cholera barracks against her will proved to be all that was necessary to touch off one of the major labor disturbances in Russia in the 1890s, the 1892 Iuzovka "chol­ era bunt."1S P. Pokrovskii, "Kak zhivet donetskii shakhter," Russkoe bogatstvo, no. 12 (1913): 255. Nancy Mandelker Frieden, Russian Physicians in an Era of Reform and Revolution, 18561905 (Princeton, 1981), p. 143. 15Potolov, Rabochie Donbassa, pp. 211-212; T. Kharechko, "Sotsial-demokraticheskii soiuz gornozavodskikh rabochikh (iz istorii revoliutsionnogo dvizheniia ν Donbasse)," Leto13

14

WORKING-CLASS DAILY LIFE

71

Police departments in the Donbass-Dnepr Bend also failed to keep pace with the region's rapid development—at least until around the turn of the century, when pleas from industrialists and a sharp upsurge in the number and scope of labor disturbances in the Donbass-Dnepr Bend pushed the central government to enlarge police staffs in industrial areas. It was largely at industrialists' expense that the government began to increase police forces to levels commensurate with the region's rapid industrialization and urbanization, although the size of police forces varied from city to city.16 When public services were increased in the Donbass-Dnepr Bend—and this was also true with regard to schools and medical care—the factories and mines either largely paid the bill or directly provided the service them­ selves. Whatever the size of police forces in Donbass-Dnepr Bend cities, the quality of individual policemen was woefully low. As elsewhere in Russia, the police were not known for their professionalism or incorruptibility.17 Donbass-Dnepr Bend police forces employed illiterates, offered little training, and suffered turnover rates rivaling those in the industrial labor force. Low pay and low status were primarily responsible for the low cali­ ber of police recruits. On average, policemen earned even less than workers in the Donbass-Dnepr Bend, although the police received considerable income under the table. Still, on the eve of the 1905 Revolution, the govpts* rcvoliutsii, no. 3 (1925): 10. The problem with the authorities' response to the cholera epidemic in Iuzovka was more a matter of implementation than methods. Containment of a cholera epidemic among the little-educated masses required compulsion. Workers distrusted and often hated doctors, seeing them as "part of the educated, privileged, and hostile estab­ lishment" (Friedgut, "Labor Violence," p. 251). Some sense of the obstacles facing authori­ ties in their efforts to protect workers can be gleaned from a doctor's experience at the Rutchenkovka mine: "I often arrived at the residence of a cholera patient to see a gathering of his neighbors and acquaintances. This habit is Hiffimlr to eradicate because of the extreme igno­ rance of the worker masses at the mine. Typically, all reasoning regarding the danger of con­ tamination met the argument that 'everything occurs according to God's will'" (Boikov, Otcbet ο kholemot epidemit, p. 422). 16 Fartory and mine funds supported 524 of the 763 urban police officers serving in Ekaterinoslav province in 1901. In two industrial cities lacking official city status, Kamenskoe and Iuzovka, public services were particularly inadequate; yet the police forces had been so beefed up by the end of the century that the policeman-to-resident ratio exceeded the rela­ tively high ratio in the capital city of Ekaterinoslav. In contrast, in Ekaterinoslav's workingclass suburbs of Amur and Nizhnedneprovsk, there was only one policeman for every 1,252 residents; and in the factory city of Lugansk, the ratio was one policeman per 1,007 residents (Tsentral'nyi statisticheskii komitet Ministerstva vnutrennikh del, Goroda Rossit, pp. 196197; Parasun'ko, Polozhenie i bor'ba, p. 525). Neil Weissman concluded that "shortfalls in police complements were a particular problem in the many new industrial centers" (Neil Weissman, "Regular Police in Tsarist Russia, 1900-1914," Russian Review 44, no. 1 [1985]: 46). 17 Richard G. Robbins, The Tsar's Viceroys: Russian Provincial Governors in the Last Tears of the Empire (Ithaca, N.Y., 1987), pp. 184-185; Weissman, "Regular Police."

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emor of Ekaterinoslav reported that police wages in the province created "a dangerous situation."18 The inadequacy of the Donbass-Dnepr Bend police was particularly felt in the poor and industrial districts. Despite paying the greater part of the cost for their city's police force, the large Donbass-Dnepr Bend companies did not consider relying solely on city police. These factories and mines had their own private security guards for protection. In Iuzovka, the New Russia Company employed a police force larger than that of the city it­ self—sixty-five guards at an annual cost of forty thousand rubles, compared to the sixty-four police on the city's payroll. It is not surprising to find that according to a government report, a factory in a Donbass-Dnepr Bend steel town normally was well policed, while in the streets just outside the factory gates, all sorts of thieves and "expropriators" reigned supreme.19 To police Donbass-Dnepr Bend streets was not easy. The continual in­ flux of young peasants and transients into the industrial boomtowns cre­ ated enormous problems that were even further aggravated during those occasional years when the opportunity for work slackened or contracted. Even though Donbass-Dnepr Bend industry generally suffered from a shortage of workers, the labor market did fluctuate. It was not always a seller's market.20 During economic downturns, most of those thrown out of work returned to their native villages. In 1901, when the number of unemployed quickly reached 10,000, the government established special low railroad fares to help facilitate unemployed workers' immediate return to the countryside.21 Many, however, stayed to join the increasingly large number of vagrants and thieves congregating in Donbass-Dnepr Bend in­ dustrial cities. Raggedly clothed tramps became a fixture of Donbass-Dnepr Bend street life. In response, city governments tried to facilitate philanthropic endeavors by the local elite, including industrialists. By the late 1890s, in 18 TsGLA, f. 1284, d. Ill, p. 2. Throughout the period covered by this study, DonbassDnepr Bend police forces proved hopelessly inadequate in the face of any sizable disorder. To restore order, the governor repeatedly needed to call in troops. 19 TsGAOR, DP 00,4-e d-vo, f. 102,1907, op. 116, d. 18, ch. 9 (Po Ekatmnoslavskoigub. obshcbcstvennoe nastroenu), pp. 18, 113. 20 A weak southern harvest was the usual reason for the temporary downturns in job op­ portunities in Donbass-Dnepr Bend industry. Southern agriculture and industry drew largely from the same pool for their unskilled labor. A poor harvest meant the number of laborers willing to work in industry during those summers increased. These seasonal fluctuations, though, were just brief deviations from the general sharp rise in the number of jobs created ui the Donbass-Dnepr Bend from the 1870s to 1900. It was only during the years 1901 to 1903, when international economic conditions caused the mining and metallurgical indus­ tries to go from boom to bust, that workers' marketability underwent a dramatic turnabout. 21 Peter I. Liashchenko, History of the Nationai Economy cfRussia to 1917, trans. L. M. Her­ man (New York, 1949), p. 656.

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Ekaterinoslav at least, charity for the needy was thriving. Shelters, flop­ houses, and medical clinics, as well as inexpensive cafeterias, soup kitchens, and teahouses, received funding. Three kopecks bought a place for an in­ digent to spend the night with a roof overhead and a hot meal during the day.22 Two soup kitchens in Ekaterinoslav served almost five hundred meals a day.23 But these philanthropic efforts were never sufficient to meet the need. During the economic nosedive in the first years of the twentieth century, the number of poor and unemployed living on the streets of Don­ bass-Dnepr Bend cities mushroomed, and the programs designed to ame­ liorate the situation could not keep pace.24 The rapid growth of industrial towns in the Donbass-Dnepr Bend sig­ nified opportunity and attracted not just those in search of work, but all sorts of people, including adventurers and criminals. In addition, around the turn of the century, newspapers noted a sharp upsurge in the number of teenagers living on the streets. They survived through petty theft, pros­ titution, and begging. According to newspaper accounts, on DonbassDnepr Bend city streets any passerby at all well-dressed was sure to be approached by "ragamuffins" begging or soliciting. 25 Ekaterinoslav police arrested as many as twenty a day of these children of the streets.26 The importunity and cavalier style of the girls especially was scandalous enough to be newsworthy. Readers of the Ekaterinoslav newspaper Pridneprovskii krai could find on January 15,1900 a reporter's account of being besieged by seventeen different illicit requests and proposals during his evening stroll the day before. The article's tone was one of both outrage and exas­ perated helplessness. It ended, "Can nothing really be done to free our boulevards of this ulcer?"27 While workers generally left their families behind in the village, many did raise children in the Donbass-Dnepr Bend's rough working-class dis­ tricts, often with unfortunate results. Before they were old enough to work, most such children spent their days left to their own devices. Along with children of the non-working-class poor, workers' children often 22 A. E. Vartminskii, "Ob epidemii sypnogo i vozvratnogo tifov ν g. Mariupole," Vrachebno-sanitarnaiakhronikaEkaterinoslavskcngubcrnii, no. 9 (September 1909): 352; Ekaterinosiavskii listok, May 4, 1904, p. 3. 23 Naviazhskii, "V ozhidanii kholery," p. 172. 24 TsGIA, f. 1263, op. 2, d. 5724 (IzvUcbenie iz vsepoddanneishego otchetaza 1892g. osostoianii Ekaterinoslavskoi gubemii), pp. 84—86. 25 Donctskoe slovo, July 9,1906, p. 4. 26 Pridneprovskii krai, January 22, 1900, p. 3. 27 P. 3. Like the other social consequcnces of rapid industrialization and urbanization, such developments were hardly unique to the Donbass-Dnepr Bend. For a discussion of the "new crime" of hooliganism that focuses on St. Petersburg, see Joan Neuberger, "Crime and Cul­ ture."

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joined the runaways living on the streets in petty theft, prostitution, and begging.28 The newspapers and local social critics placed much of the blame for juvenile delinquency on the government's feeble commitment to lowerclass education. The Ekaterinoslav newspaper VestntkIuga argued dramat­ ically that the absence of even a single school in the industrial suburb of Amur had dire consequences for the whole society and not just for the children deprived of an education: The majority of them degenerate into that sort of person it has become custom­ ary to call "hooligan." Already from the age of seven they begin stealing, often using violence. They become more and more embittered and, by the time they are fifteen, their experiences have produced glaring examples of that type of Black Hundred with a rich reserve of hatred toward all that is honest . . . bands of children aged seven to twelve have become notorious as the most awful cut­ throats.29

The number of public schools in Donbass-Dnepr Bend cities proved far from sufficient to meet the growing mass demand (much of the middle class and the rich could, of course, afford private schools and tutors).30 As in other matters, Ekaterinoslav was in a better financial position to support mass education than other industrial cities in the Donbass-Dnepr Bend. Even so, Ekaterinoslav, the city to which workers were most inclined to bring their families, could as late as 1905 muster only enough funding to operate twenty public schools, and these were often little more than oneroom primary schools.31 Factories, along with churches, could not provide enough schools in the industrial towns of the Donbass-Dnepr Bend to take the place of an ade­ quate public-school system. Factories made an effort, though, as they were required to do by the factory legislation of June 12, 1884.32 By the first years of the twentieth century, schools existed at twenty-seven of the thirty-one largest mines and at fifteen of the region's twenty-two steel mills.33 The total number of schools is misleading, however—at least from Pridneprovskii krai, January 22,1900, p. 3. August 5, 1905, p. 3. 30 Working-class districts and towns fell outside the purview of the zemstvos. Even though in Donbass-Dnepr Bend mining districts mines provided 40 to 50 percent of zemstvo fund­ ing, their workers did not benefit from the zemstvos' educational efforts (Gorno-zavodskii Iistok, October 16, 1904, p. 7249). 31 Pridnepnmkii krai reported that "only two of the schools have good, suitable rooms" (July 15, 1905, p. 3). 32 Griffin, "Formative Years," p. 646. 33 TsGIA, f. 37, op. 58, d. 299 (Dnevnik komissiiA. A. Shtofa), p. 90; TsGAOR, f. 7952, op. 6, d. 86, p. 108; I. S. Rozental', "Dukhovnye zaprosy rabochikh Rossii posle revoliutsii 1905-1907 gg.,"IstoricheskUzapiski 10 (1982): 73; Avdakov, "O merakh," p. 18. 28

29

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75

the workers' perspective. Factory primary schools were often opened to meet the needs of a factory's foreign community, rather than those of its Russian workers. For example, the New Russia Company was considered by many to be a model firm in regard to education, but only one of the company's two primary schools in Iuzovka was truly open to the children of workers. The other one catered to the foreign population and conducted classes only in English. For a worker's child to attend one of the secondary schools that a few factories provided required an extraordinary commit­ ment from the parents. Whereas company primary education was usually free or required nominal tuition, the tuition for secondary grades could equal an entire month's income for a steelworker. When the ftiture Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev attended the Southern Russia Company's gimnaziia in Kamenskoe, he was the only worker's son in his class of forty students.34 Donbass-Dnepr Bend workers who were determined to broaden their own horizons would have been hard-pressed to do so through legal chan­ nels. But for some workers, Sunday schools and night classes filled this gap.35 As with other schools, the best place to be was Ekaterinoslav, where opportunities to learn exceeded those in other Donbass-Dnepr Bend in­ dustrial cities. In the smaller industrial towns, there was "almost no one willing to work in the area of enlightening the worker masses."36 Ekaterinoslav was one of only thirteen cities in Russia where philan­ thropic liberals, wishing to raise the "moral and intellectual level" of work­ ers, established Sunday schools for adult workers in the early 1890s. As the local newspaper recognized, with the city's transformation from an insig­ nificant small town to an industrial center "the character of the population changed significandy. Out of the earlier, formless and identical mass of poor emerged the Svorker,' in the contemporary sense of the word, com­ plicating our lives and putting us face to face with the serious questions of life."37 The sponsors and teachers of the Sunday school demonstrated con­ siderable dedication toward their goal of bringing basic educational skills to the working classes. Their achievement was, nonetheless, quite limited in scope. Ekaterinosla^s Sunday school enrolled no more than one hun­ dred workers in its separate courses for men and women, a much smaller number than the programs in the capitals and some of the other partici­ pating cities in Russia. Also, judging from who enrolled in the courses, this educational opportunity did not appeal to the mass of workers. Eka34 TsGIA, f. 37, op. 58, d. 299 (Dnevnik komissii A. A. Shtofa), p. 96; John Dornberg, Brezhnev: The Masks cf Power (New York, 1974), p. 43. 35 Radical study groups, kruzhki, will be discussed in chapter 5. 36 Vestnik Iuga, September 23,1905, p. 4. 37 Pridnepravskii krai, January 15,1905, p. 2.

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terinoslav's Sunday school students were drawn from among the city's skilled workers, artisans, and domestic servants.38 In 1905 local chapters of the Imperial Russian Technical Society began to offer night classes for workers in such Donbass-Dnepr Bend cities as Ekaterinoslav, Kamenskoe, and Iuzovka. For fifty kopecks a year, workers could attend two-hour classes that met four to six days a week. Courses were taught at six different levels in subjects ranging from reading and arithmetic for illiterate workers to physics, algebra, and literature for the most educated among them. Hundreds of students enrolled, but the revo­ lutionary events of 1905 hurt daily attendance in the course's first year. When Kamenskoe was placed under martial law, attendance dwindled; workers were afraid they would be beaten by Cossacks if they were still on the street after 9 P.M. 39 The government and the social elite in Donbass-Dnepr Bend cities and towns did not provide the financial support necessary for the establishment of a symphony, ballet, or other forms of high culture. Workers, of course, had never been exposed to the arts and would have had litde interest in attending, even assuming they could have afforded the price of admission. But it was not just the more elite forms of culture that were lacking. Out­ side Ekaterinoslav, Donbass-Dnepr Bend cities did not even have daily newspapers. The Donbass-Dnepr Bend did not offer much of what is thought to be wholesome "low" culture, either. Ekaterinoslav and the other steel cities and towns lacked the organized sports and plebeian entertainment already existing in similar cities outside Russia. In Pittsburgh, for example, steelworkers in the late nineteenth century commonly spent their leisure time participating in competitive sports such as bowling, baseball, and rowing. Workers packed the numerous halls that presented variety shows. Later, in the early twentieth century, Pittsburgh's workers attended professional baseball games and boxing matches.40 Whatever the larger industrial enterprises provided in the way of cultural opportunities was usually all that was available to Donbass-Dnepr Bend workers. As in the case of schools, Donbass-Dnepr Bend enterprises made various attempts to compensate for the absence of cultural or recreational programs for workers. Around the turn of the century, many companies started to spend the money necessary to offer workers what they consid­ ered to be uplifting alternatives to the ways in which workers usually spent la. V. Abramov, Nashi voskresnye shkoly (St. Petersburg, 1900), p. 246; Pridneprovskii krai, January 15, 1905, p. 2. 39 Zaptski Ekaterinoslavskogo otdelcmia Imperatorskogo russkqgo tekhntcheskogo obshchestva, no. 6-8 (1906): 1-12. 40 Francis G. Couvares, TheRemaktng of Pittsburgh: Class and Ctdture in an Industrializing City, 1877-1919 (Albany, N.Y., 1984), pp. 39-45, 120-124. 38

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their free time. The Briansk factory in Ekaterinoslav was one of two mills in the region to build its own auditorium. But though the sign above the entrance proclaimed "The Workers' Auditorium," in practice it was pri­ marily utilized by the administrative staff—at least until revolutionary groups and workers repeatedly seized the auditorium for themselves in 1905. Even so, the factory sponsored light-minded plays on the Briansk auditorium stage in which workers often performed alongside their supe­ riors within the enterprise. These performances were much better attended by workers than other cultural programs, with audiences often reaching six to seven hundred in number. Twice a week, Briansk workers could enjoy music in the auditorium, or, if the weather was good, in the square outside. At these events, the factory administration sold pamphlets produced by literacy societies at an 80 percent discount. At such bargain prices, workers reportedly gobbled up these brochures "as if they were blintzes."41 Ten of the twenty-two large steel mills had opened libraries or reading rooms by 1913. For the mass of workers, the absence of a factory library meant that in addition to not having much to read, they had precious few places to sit in relative peace and quiet. As we have seen, most workers lived in crowded, noisy conditions, whether in private or factory housing. Company barracks were inexpensive or free, but for a worker interested in reading, they were a continual cause of frustration. Most unskilled work­ ers, particularly the miners, could not spend their leisure time reading, even if they wanted to. Whereas 60 percent of Donbass-Dnepr Bend met­ allurgical workers were literate, according to the 1897 census, only 31 per­ cent of miners were.42 Of those who could read, few did.43 Most observers of the miners would agree with the impression recorded by A. Shestakov, a Social Democratic organizer active in the Donets Basin in the first years of the twentieth century: "Donbass miners never read. They live to work and get drunk."44 As meager as the cultural offerings in most factory towns were, the sit­ uation was much worse at the isolated mining setdements dotting the Do­ nets Basin. This is not to say that some mine operators did not make an effort to provide, at their own expense, leisure-time alternatives to drink­ ing. If none of the mines built auditoriums, by the 1890s most of the larger 41 TsGAOR, f. 7952, op. 6, d. 86 (Izdatel'stvo 'lstoriifabrik ι zavodov"), p. 109; Pridneprovshi krai, January 4, 1900, p. 3. One study of the budgets of 38 percent of the metallurgical workers at the Hartmann plant in Lugansk revealed that these relatively well paid workers spent six rubles annually on books and performances (V. Ovsiannikov, "Dovoennye biudzhety russkikh rabochikh, Voprosy truda, no. 10 [1925]: 61, cited in Rozental', "Dukhovnye zaprosy," p. 74). 42 Potolov, Rabocbie Donbassa, p. 133. 43 Lisser, "Gomorabochie," pp. 759—760. 44 A. Shestakov, "Na zare rabochego dvizheniia ν Donbasse," Proletarskaia repohutsiia, no. 1 (1921), p. 160.

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enterprises did make some genteel recreation possible. Most provided large recreation rooms and some regular entertainment. After the turn of the century, many mines began to hold Sunday and holiday readings.45 Some even managed to present plays or readings on a monthly basis, which at­ tracted the whole community—although only those who were sober and had washed at the baths were permitted entrance.46 Going for a stroll was a favorite leisure activity in the larger DonbassDnepr Bend cities, as in all of urban Russia. In Ekaterinoslav, representa­ tives of all social strata thronged Potemkin park in the center of town, where one could promenade to military music performed by a brass band. Fashionable society had not been scared away, thanks largely to the fee that served to limit the numbers admitted from the lower classes.47 The scene was more raucous when the park built in the Briansk factory administra­ tion's residential colony was open to workers. The Briansk park opened its gates to workers just two days a week, and then only to those willing to pay a nominal fee. Until forced to leave at 2 A.M., most workers strolled, drank furtively, and rested on the park's benches. Others contributed to the racket that filled the air by beating bass drums or playing skitdes and other games.4® Heavy drinking played a central role in Donbass-Dnepr Bend workingclass life and generally provided the escape workers sought. It was also commonly thought to be the vice that underlay all of the workers' other vices. Most outside observers sounded patronizing, if generally sympa­ thetic, when they discussed the cause of workers' drunkenness. Doctor N. Putiagin stated in his report to the 1908-9 congress of Don oblast doc­ tors: "These unskilled people are the most ignorant workers in the world. Children of the dark village, mentally and morally wretched and generally helpless, they have fallen into what is for them an unaccustomed life and work situation. In response they become still more helpless, losing the ground under their feet. Degenerating morally and physically, a significant percentage of these workers become alcoholics."49 Temperance societies, such as the two established at the turn of the century in Ekaterinoslav and Lugansk to check working-class alcoholism, were of litde consequence.50 Lisscr, "Gomorabochie," p. 759; TsGIA, f. 37, op. 58, d. 299 (Dncmik komisstiA. A. Sbtofa), p. 108. 44 Gorno-zavodskti listok, June 3, 1906, p. 8537. 47 Mashukov, Vaspomttumua, p. 49. 48 Vcstmk Iuga^ August 13, 1905, p. 3. 49 Quoted in Kim Zelenskii, ShakJrtmskie gorniaki na putiakh k bol'shcvtzmu ν 1905-1908 godakh (Rostov-on-Don), p. 15. Government investigators could adopt a similarly patroniz­ ing, yet sympathetic, tone. See, for example, TsGAOR, DP OO, f. 102, 1907, d. 18, ch. 2, p. 138. 50 Priimenko, LegaPnye otganizaaii, p. 118. 45

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Donbass-Dnepr Bend workers were, of course, hardly alone in their en­ thusiasm for drink. Russian men of all classes enjoyed a reputation as hard drinkers.51 But while there is litde hard evidence on which to base com­ parison, investigators and commentators usually were of the opinion that even within this national and class context of immoderate imbibing, Don­ bass-Dnepr Bend workers drank much more than their share.52 Miners became widely renowned for their prodigious drinking habits. Especially on those Sundays that coincided with payday or were part of an extended holiday, workers traditionally abandoned themselves to a style of drinking that rarely stopped before stupor. Any day off was the occasion for such a drinking binge that weekends and holidays were popularly known as "drunk days" (tfianye dni).53 There were more such days off than one might think. In the Donbass-Dnepr Bend, as in Russia generally, workers in theory worked a six-day week. In reality, the metallurgical workers and miners at best averaged a five-day workweek.54 The large number of national and local religious holidays Donbass-Dnepr Bend industry felt compelled to observe, combined with the government-mandated half day on Saturdays, was not the only reason steelworkers and miners did not actually work the six-day week.55 An in­ ordinate amount of worker absenteeism following holidays—primarily due to continued heavy drinking or the need to sleep off their sprees—helped further whitde down the length of the average workweek.56 Rare indeed was the young worker who did not start seriously drinking immediately upon leaving work at two o'clock Saturday afternoon. Often, that meant workers started drinking while still on the street. Here and there in the dusty side alleys of the factory and mining towns, small clusters of workers could be seen huddled around a bottle. As today, the style in Russia was not to sip. One drank to get drunk. Workers passed around and For a discussion of Russian patterns of food and alcohol consumption, see R. E. F. Smith and David Christian, Bread and Salt: A Social and Economic History of Food and Drink in Russia (Cambridge, England, 1984). 52 See, for example, Statisticheskii otdel Ekaterinoslavskogo gubemskogo zemstva, Sbornik statisticheskikh svedenii po Ekaterinoslavskoi gubernii, vol. 2, Bakhmutskii uezd (Ekaterinoslav, 1886), p. 322; and Lisser, "Gomorabochie," p. 759. 53 Sbomik po Ekaterinoslavskoi, p. 323. 54 N. S. Avdakov, Doklad komissii po voprosu ob uluchshenii byta rabochtkh na kamennougol'nykh kopiakh Iuzhnoi Rossii (Kharkov, 1900), p. 9; SeryiiRabochte, p. 192. An 1884 zemstvo study found that Donets Basin miners who were employed year-round worked between 215 and 240 days a year. Sixteen years later, in 1900, an industry commission found that Donets Basin miners still worked only 250 days a year (Kirtanov, Zhiznennyt uroven', pp. 78-79). 55 Taskin, K voprosu ο prrvlechenii, p. 11. 54 Many of those workers who did come to work following "drunk days" were suffering from such frightful hangovers that they risked injuring themselves and others, did litde real work, and might as well have stayed away. 51

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quickly downed a bottle—usually some variety or other of cheap alcohol, typically vodka low in quality but potent.57 Workers leaving work hardly needed to drink on the street. Taverns started opening for business near a new Donbass-Dnepr Bend industrial enterprise the day the first construction workers were hired. Taverns be­ came so widespread in working-class districts that they could be found almost anywhere a worker's daily routine might take him. Steelworkers in Kamenskoe had a choice of sixteen different taverns within just fifty meters of the plant gate.58 Bars and liquor stores practically abutted some workers' barracks. In the opinion of an 1894 industry commission that addressed the question of regulating the sale of vodka in mining districts, the close proximity of taverns to workers made worker drunkenness a foregone con­ clusion: "Since the underground labor of coal miners is such heavy, diffi­ cult work, they need to relax after work even more than other workers . .. if on the way to relaxation stand kabaki, with their doors always cordially open—the path to rest is direct."59 Management could do little to restrict the accessibility of alcohol. Many mine operators even lacked the power to keep bars and liquor stores off the mine's property because the land was rented.60 In addition, liquor sales were an important source of government revenue, making fiscal considerations a major obstacle to meaningful re­ form.61 But the mining companies' failure to close nearby taverns was probably of much less consequence than the industrialists believed. The central government's decision in the 1890s to restrict the retail sale of al­ cohol to state stores and the few successful attempts by firms to restrict the number of places selling alcohol only seemed to increase the amount sold under the counter.62 57Doklad

komissiiXVlll s"ezdagornopromyshUnnikovIugaRosni (Kharkov, 1894), p. 332. Parasun'ko, PoIozhenie i bor'ba, pp. 123, 383. 59 Avdakov, cO merakh," p. 333. 60 These mines had signed long-term contracts—thirty-six-year leases—in which their au­ thority above ground often was circumscribed by their lessor's desire for additional income (ibid., pp. 332—333). 61 In 1892, when doctors and mine inspectors demanded that taverns be closed after the cholera epidemic struck the Donbass-Dnepr Bend, the minister of finance, Sergei Witte, strongly objected and underscored the losses to the treasury if drinking establishments in Ekaterinoslav province were closed (Parasun'ko, Polozhenie ι bor'ba, p. 383). When Witte introduced the reform designed to establish a total state monopoly of the liquor trade two years later, he sanctimoniously declared, lTTie reform must be directed, first of all towards increasing popular sobriety, and only then can it concern itself with the interests of the trea­ sury" (Smith and Christian, Bread and Salt, pp. 313—315). 62 The Ekaterinoslav governor's own report conceded that the reform failed to inhibit ille­ gal sales of vodka and beer "in restaurants, cafSs, teahouses, shops, secret dens of depravity [pritonye razvraty], and even private homes" (TsGIA, f. 1282,1901, op. 3, d. 463 [Izvlechente iz vscpoddanneishego otcheta za 1900g. ο sostotanii Ekaterinaslavskoigubemti], p. 13; Ν. N. Shipov, Alkogolizm i revoliutsiia [St. Petersburg, 1908], p. 61). 58

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Taverns offered workers a social environment all their own. Especially for workers living in company barracks, taverns served as informal social centers, the one place beyond the meddling of the bosses—the "colony people" (although company barracks had their full share of "drunkenness, fights, and even killings").63 Spending free time in bleak barracks not sur­ prisingly had litde appeal compared to the conviviality, music, women, and gambling taverns could offer. Not that miners' and steelworkers' taverns were anything fancy; they were dirty and greasy, often a simple shack. Sex between the workers and the women they met in the taverns added vene­ real disease to the list of scourges of Donbass-Dnepr Bend working-class life. A few of the better taverns, however, boasted bright wallpaper and even tables covered with white tablecloths (at least when they first opened for the day). Skilled steelworkers often not only washed off the grime of the mills, but even changed into whatever was the current fashion of pro­ letarian dandies before setting off for the taverns. In worker memoirs, the image of a worker in a tavern singing drinking ditties or tearful songs la­ menting life's injustices to the accompaniment of an accordion, harmonica, balalaika, or guitar, in a room full of workers all drinking and singing along, provides a cherished (if romanticized) picture of Donbass-Dnepr Bend working-class camaraderie.64 Almost the entire working class participated in the weekend and holiday carousing, from highly skilled, highly paid lathe operators earning two to three hundred rubles a month to miners and unskilled steelworkers earning one-tenth as much.65 In pit villages such as Gorlovka, "from the moment wages were paid Saturday until Monday evening the taverns there swarmed with workers."66 At some mines, mass drunkenness continued on such a scale following a payday that large-scale absenteeism would force a mine to close down for two, three, or even four days. During these binges, some workers were sure to drink themselves into a state of delirium tre­ mens. Some workers had histories of almost never making it to work on Mondays. In pursuit of oblivion, workers often squandered their entire pay, earned through such backbreaking and dangerous labor, or even went into debt to the tavern. A government report noted that of the 350,000 63 Zaks, "Trud i byt," p. 93. The labor shortage in the Donbass-Dnepr Bend no doubt largely explains why industrialists there made litde effort to enforce rules—unlike employers in Moscow, where workers were commonly fined for "drinking, loud talking, card playing, and singing" in company barracks, or even for failing "to keep their beds clean and tidy" (Johnson, Peasant and Proletarian, p. 85). 64 A. N. Shcherban' and A. A. Rutenko, Stramtsy letopisi donetskoi (Kiev, 1963), p. 36; Zaks, "Trud i byt," p. 94; P. Kharlamov, Rozhdenie zavoda (Probnataglava iz istorii Dnepropetrovskqgo metallurgicheskogo zavoda im. Petrovskojo) (Kharkov, 1934), p. 9. 65 Shestakov, "Na zare," p. 157. 66 Gessen, Istoriiagornorabochikb, p. 92.

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rubles one Donbass-Dnepr Bend steel mill paid out to its workers every two weeks, 150,000 rubles were spent on alcohol.67 Up to a point, workers' squandering of their pay on alcohol may have served Donbass-Dnepr Bend industrialists' interests by limiting turnover somewhat, since most workers intended to return to their home villages only after they had saved some cash. On the other hand, all the industrial­ ists complained about their workers' drinking and the resulting absentee­ ism, on-the-job accidents, and low output. In the words of one mine direc­ tor, the mass drunkenness following paydays was "the scourge of mine life."68 Management argued that in addition to the availability of alcohol in the Donbass-Dnepr Bend, the high pay scale was largely responsible for fostering worker drunkenness. The annual reports of the Association of Southern Coal and Steel Producers contained statements such as the fol­ lowing: "Nothing is more dangerous than to give the mass of the common people so much money. They can spare almost half of what they earn, which hardly induces them to treat their wages judiciously."69 The church chimed in. The pastor of the Preobrazhenskii Church in Iuzovka deplored how "good pay gave the worker the opportunity to satisfy every desire, and speculators of every sort served up the means of pandering to the low­ est tendencies of the worker, who, even without this, did not have the most honorable code."70 Other than illegally keeping paydays infrequent, management usually felt it had no alternative besides fines to combat absenteeism on Mondays or other days following holidays and paydays, since the labor shortage dis67 Avdakov, "O merakh," p. 333; Fenin, Vospominaniia, p. 53; Sbornikpo Ekaterinoslavskoi, pp. 322—323; Nikolaenko, Revdiutsionnoe dvizhenie, p. 53; TsGIA, f. 23, op. 30, d. 47 (IzvUchenie iz vsepoddanneishego otchcta za 1898 g. ο sastoianii EkMennoslavskoi gubcmii), p. 149; Kharlamov, Rozhdenie zavoda, p. 9; Fenin, "Neskol'ko slov," p. 33; Lisser, Gornorabocbie, p. 759; TsGAOR, DP OO, 4-e d-vo, f. 102, 1907, op. 116, d. 18, ch. 9 (Po Ekaterinoslavskoi gub. obshchestvennoe nastroenie), pp. 15-16. 68 Fenin, Vospominaniia, p. 53. 69 Fenin, "Neskol'ko slov," p. 34. Because payday lent itself to the greatest excesses, many enterprises petitioned the government to allow them to pay workers either indirectly or less frequently. The government denied such requests (Rubin, Rabocbii vopras, pp. 21—22). Mines already had a reputation for cheating workers out of what they owed them. A few mines and mills nonetheless managed to disregard the law and give workers only a portion of their monthly wage. The rest of their monthly earnings were either sent home then or held by the enterprise until the semiannual holidays—Easter in the spring and the autumn saint's day Pokrov den'—when the work force customarily turned over and workers returned to their village homes. According to mine administrator Fenin, "this illegal action was the most effec­ tive measure in the struggle against drunkenness; however, it did give the management a lot of extra trouble" (Vospominaniia, p. 53). Of course, infrequent paydays also allowed many companies to increase their profits, since this practice commonly forced workers to buy on credit at the overpriced company stores. 70 Quoted in Friedgut Iuzovka and Revolution, pp. 71—72. 1

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couraged firing workers. Given that mine jobs were so often plentiful, a partial explanation for the absentee problem may be that miners were col­ lectively flaunting their power over their employers in one area where they could do so.71 Foremen fined workers for unexcused absences at some risk to themselves. For example, on February 6, 1903, when a Briansk factory foreman refused to excuse Vasilii Vologuchev after the still-drunk worker finally appeared at work following a three-day absence, the worker went after him with a knife. The foreman escaped with his life only because the cigarette case in his pocket deflected the blow from his heart.72 Fining workers put not only the individual foreman at risk. Paydays could be es­ pecially explosive when workers saw how much had been deducted from their pay. During work stoppages, striking workers typically demanded the elimination of fines. The medical investigator I. L. Lisser stated that iron miners in the Krivoi Rog generally did not drink during the week, but this was not the consen­ sus.73 In fact, Lisser probably would have been hard-pressed to find anyone else familiar with Donbass-Dnepr Bend working-class drinking habits to agree with him. Most sources report that Donbass-Dnepr Bend workers not only drank during the week, but also often disregarded company rules and drank on the job. The skilled steelworker Kostia Norinskii remem­ bered that during water breaks, workers, especially blast-furnace workers, quenched their thirst surreptitiously with vodka, which was always hidden somewhere near the water bucket.74 Many workers justified on-the-job drinking with the belief that alcohol helped to counter the effects of labor­ ing in cold or wet conditions, as in the damp underground mines.75 Drink­ ing in the mines was, of course, hardly healthful, since it contributed to the extraordinarily high accident rate. Doctor Putiagin not only stated that workers drank on the job, but claimed that if workers were not drinking during work shifts, it was only because they were using work as a time to sober up.76 What is indisputable is that come the weekend or a holiday, workers loved nothing more than to gather together to drink. It was no coincidence that the most riotous labor disturbances usually began on weekends or holidays. What workers did not spend on alcohol might be lost in gambling. 71 The high rates of absenteeism in the Donbass-Dnepr Bend can also be attributed simply to the difficulty peasant recruits experienced in adjusting to industrial labor, the benefits of zemliachestvo notwithstanding. Absenteeism is common internationally during the initial stages of industrialization. 72 EkaterinosUmkii listok, May 13,1904, p. 3. 73 Lisser, Gornorabocbie, p. 759. 74 K. M. Norinskii, "Na svoikh khlebakh," Istoriia ckatcrinoslavskoi, p. 38. 751. Kuznetsov, " Rabochii klass i alkogol'naia problema," Gomorabochit, no. 7-8 (1922): 43. 76 Zelenskii, ShaJthtinskiegomiaki, p. 15.

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Workers' card games lasted into the small hours of the morning. They played for serious stakes and could be "cleaned out down to their last dime." Of course, by the same token, some workers picked up extra cash. Everv so often, a worker was said to have returned to his village to buy land after hitting a jackpot.77 The winning and losing, however, were not necessarily kept within the family, so to speak. Even within the barracks, outsiders joined workers' card games. Usually these outsiders consisted of young peasants from neighboring villages. However, cardsharps clandes­ tinely working in tandem also descended on workers' payday card games. ITiese hustlers considered workers simpletons, easy prey. And indeed, workers were no match for such professionals. It was not unheard of for a cardsharp to walk away from a factory or mine with a haul of thousands of rubles.78 A small minority of workers looked with disdain upon ail this carousing. Some of these workers joined the revolutionary movement. In his mem­ oirs, A. I. Smimov, a Briansk factory worker active in the embryonic socialdemocratic movement during the 1890s, did not credit hatred of the au­ tocracy, poor working and living conditions, or a reading of Marx for pushing him to become involved in the radical movement, but rather a revulsion toward working-class alcoholism. In an emotional account that has the overtones of a religious conversion, Smirnov recalled a crucial junc­ ture in his and another seventeen-year-old Briansk factory worker's path toward becoming Social Democrats: Our fathers worked together in the rail-rolling shop at the Briansk factory. One night around midnight, the two of us arrived simultaneously at the " Krasnoe selo," a tavern in the factory quarter in which our fathers' artel chose to squander their wages. We had both come to retrieve our fathers. But all our requests to leave were met with slaps. We could not simply leave because we knew when we arrived home we would be told to return for our fathers. So we just stood on the street near the tavern and waited for our fathers to leave. They drank and ate for a long while, which gave us rime to do a great deal of thinking and to ask our­ selves why workers needed to get drunk and who profited from it. We decided then and there to devote ourselves to struggling for these wretched, ignorant, oppressed people who were destroying their health in factories and taverns. From this memorable night, we began to look for people who could show us the true path, who could show us how to unite all workers.79 — Algasov and Pakcntrcigcr, Brtansku razboiniki, p. 15. Such stones may well have been legends. "8Ibid. ' ' A l . S m i m o v , " 1 Yospormname ο 1-om kruzhke s.-d. rabochei partii g . Ekaterinoslava ν 1894 g.."Istvnut ckatermaslevskoi, p. 12.

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Not only did many of the workers drawn to the revolutionary movement look with disdain upon the drinking of their fellow workers, they often refrained from smoking and swearing and were expected to stop visiting prostitutes. There was pressure not to marry, since revolutionaries argued from experience that family commitments impeded revolutionary activism. The single-mindedness and asceticism for which radical workers strove, as well as their sexism, is conveyed by an incident the radical worker Ivan Babushkin included in his memoirs. Babushkin rejected two women's re­ quest to join his social-democratic reading circle after asking himself, 4Would the presence of attractive members of the opposite sex not have a retarding effect on our studies?"80 Just how prevalent Donbass-Dnepr Bend workers' penchant for carous­ ing was may be judged by the following: It was suspect for a group of workers to ever get together and not drink, gamble, and generally make a racket. A. Maleev, a Donbass-Dnepr Bend social-democratic organizer, remembered that a radical worker kruzhok, or circle, meeting in a worker's apartment was sure to attract dangerous attention if curious eavesdroppers did not see alcohol and cards on the table. To deflect suspicion, Maleev5S kruzhok established a rule that: at every meeting there should be a quart of vodka, some bottles of beer, and an accordion on the table.81 Such appearances of alcohol at kruzhok meetings were not always for show. While the most politically committed workers in the DonbassDnepr Bend often shared with radical students puritanical ideas, the lesscommitted workers within the movement showed no interest in abandon­ ing customary ways. Babushkin recalled how in his EkaterinosIav circle workers might be attentive for a couple of hours, but then "the listeners began to falter, asking me to excuse them, but they'd like to have a drink! Of course, most of them were fathers of families, or old enough to be, and I knew quite well that before I met them they spent most of their time in a saloon. And so I had to work with men who were a bit weak in the knees."82 The much-traveled activist L. Shklovskii was surprised to learn when he arrived in Lugansk in 1905 that "carousing was not considered reprehensible by members of the organization"; that at social-democratic gatherings in which workers predominated, there was no shortage of al­ cohol.83 Many Donbass-Dnepr Bend activists shared the experience of a 80 I. V. Babushkin, Recollections of Ivan Vasilyevtch Babushkin, 1893-1900 (Moscow, 1957), p. 76. 81 A. Maleev, "Aleksandrovskaia organizatsiia RSDRP ν 1900-1905 gg.," in Na barrikadakh: 1905goi ν AUksandrtmke, ed. Μ. LVovskii (Zaporozhe, 1925), p. 5. 82 Recollections, p. 138. 83 L. Shklovskii, aVospominaniia ο 1905 gode," Proletarskma rcvoliutsita, no. 48 (1926): 196.

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Jewish activist in Minsk, who drank to win the confidence of the Christian workers he sought to radicalize. "I had to drink along with them, other­ wise I would not have been a 'good brother.' I hoped that by becoming their 'good brother' I would be able to make them class conscious. In the end neither of us achieved anything. They could not make me a drunkard, and I could not make them class conscious."84 Daily life was violent in the rapidly growing Donbass-Dnepr Bend cities and towns. Hostile relations between working-class barracks, streets, and neighborhoods, sometimes a result of different ethnic or regional compo­ sitions, created sharply defined and forcibly defended territories.85 Strang­ ers entering a neighborhood ran a risk of being assaulted and robbed by young neighborhood toughs. In addition to those with a despised ethnic or regional background, outsiders carrying the markings of the privileged and educated classes—including those who thought of themselves as fight­ ers for the workers' cause—were subject to threatening taunts and merci­ less mockery, if not blows and knifings, by working-class toughs. Workers may not have been prime targets, but they, too, were subjected to assaults and muggings, especially on paydays and holidays. The mostly workingclass residents in the district neighboring the Briansk factory in Ekaterinoslav complained continually of the street theft perpetrated by small gangs. Typically, four to five "drunk idlers" (in the words of a newspaper report) would gather on a street during the evening and simply knock passersby off" their feet before robbing them.86 One former resident of Lu­ gansk remembered that gangs commonly beat their victims so badly that "for the next two weeks they were ashamed to show their faces at the fac­ tory."87 If the toughs occasionally allowed their cornered prey to escape unharmed, it was rarely without first forcing them to grovel. Nights, not surprisingly, were particularly dangerous in DonbassDnepr Bend cities and towns. Whatever order the police maintained dur­ ing the day literally disappeared with nightfall, when police vacated their street posts. Already by the 1880s, working-class toughs controlled the streets in industrial towns after dark. They robbed people at knifepoint, or even gunpoint. The Lugansk gendarme officer reported in 1886 that "po­ licemen fear going about at nighttime because of conflicts with wandering groups of young workers who go about the streets for some reason always 84 Sholem Levin, Untererdishe Kemfer (New York, 1946), p. 151, quoted in Mendelsohn, Class Struggle, p. 33. 85 Voroshilov, Rasskazy ο zbizni, p. 122. 86 Prtdneprovskii krai, October 6, 1901, p. 2. 87 Nikolaenko, Revoliutsionnoe dvizhenie, p. 7.

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armed with revolvers and fire on police patrols."88 Residents thought many workers appeared to enjoy terrorizing passersby just for the amusement. Even those closely acquainted with workers shared this view. From 1898 to 1905,1. Polonskii was a social-democratic activist in Ekaterinoslav. To illustrate the "low level of consciousness" he confronted when trying to organize workers, Polonskii wrote in his memoirs that "for entertainment, factory youths very often engaged in street violence. Even workers were afraid to walk many working-class city streets at night because they feared attack by dangerous 'pranksters' [ozorniki]."89 Isolated comments in Ivan Babushkin's memoirs speak to the crime problem in Ekaterinoslav at night, when there was not "a soul about" and it was not safe to be on the streets.90 Babushkin remembered the danger he felt whenever he returned to Eka­ terinoslav after staying until midnight or thereabouts in the industrial sub­ urbs. As crime reports in the daily press made clear, the area around the bridge across the Dnepr, which separated the city from its industrial sub­ urbs of Amur and Nizhnedneprovsk, was a favorite spot from which to mug passersby.91 Babushkin recalled, "I would set off for home, escorted by a number of the boys, to a place near the Dnepr, where there was a steep bank; from here I went on alone towards the river, shivering in the sharp, piercing wind and frost, holding a sharp dagger in my hand because it was dangerous in these parts, as I had found out once for myself when I was robbed of money and other belongings."92 Besides individual thugs and numerous petty gangs, gangs of profes­ sional thieves menaced Donbass-Dnepr Bend cities and mining setdements.93 Iuzovka was the home of two large gangs led by the Cossack ata­ mans Malakhov and Sibiriako. Attacks perpetrated by these toughs were particularly vicious and often left their victims dead. Gang murders went unpunished in the majority of cases. Because the victims were largely mi­ grant workers, far from their families, there was no one to press the case on their behalf. Even if the police apprehended a suspect, a bribe of twenty-five to fifty rubles was reputedly sufficient to set the killer free.94 Fighting and violence were so prevalent in the Donbass-Dnepr Bend that street fights figure prominently in accounts written by visiting authors 88 TsGAOR, f. 102,1887, d. 9, ch. 21, p. 43, quoted in Brower, "Labor Violence," p. 427. That workers were armed with revolvers as early as 1886 is surprising. 891. B. Polonskii, "Iz zhizni partiinoi organizatsii (1898-1900 gg. ) " I s t o r i i a c k a t c r i n o s l a v skoi, p. 139. 90 Recollections, p. 113. Babushkin, perhaps the most famous prerevolutionary organizer of worker rather than intellectual origin, was active in Ekaterinoslav during the late 1890s. 91 Ekaterinoslavskii Iistok May 4, 1904, p. 3. 1 92Recollections, p. 111. 93 Mine safes were a favorite target for night raids by gangs, which could consist of wildly shouting and shooting gypsies (Fenin, Vospominaniia, p. 88). 94 Zaitsev, "Bol'sheviki Iuzovki," p. 156.

88

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trying to give their readers a general sense of industrial cities there. The 1898 inaugural issue of a new Ekaterinoslav city publication, Ekaterinoslavskii Italendatj, which might have been expected to put the city's best foot forward, featured in its main article a vicious, bloody street fight. The au­ thor of the article was presented to the reader as an anonymous foreign visitor who had spent one week the previous summer in an unidentified Donbass-Dnepr Bend city, apparently Ekaterinoslav. He recounted a beat­ ing he had witnessed during his stay there and tried to convey the impres­ sion that such scenes were nothing out of the ordinary: Returning to my hotel, I witnessed . . . a melee on Cossack Street. The uproar, complete with the yelling and weeping of women and children, was the picture of a pogrom. I asked what was happening and was told, "Drunks are going at each other." I saw a crowd of twenty to thirty people pummeling one man in broad daylight. It was impossible for the victim to defend himself. . . . Those involved in the fighting were workers. A gang of urchins accompanied these workers when they decided to make their triumphant departure. The victim of their violence was disfigured. All sorts of cuts and braises were visible through what remained of his clothing. When this idler stood,. . . half his face was cov­ ered with blood. His arms dangled like whips. . . . Not seeing any police, I won­ dered—in what sort of place am I?95

Indeed, in what sort of place was he? Another answer is provided by the writer Konstantin Paustovsky, who briefly worked in die New Russia Company mill. In his capsule portrait of Iuzovka, Paustovsky included the following scene: As soon as two women had grabbed each other's hair with animal shrieks, a crowd would form around them and the fight would be turned into a gambling game: bets of two kopecks were placed on which one would win. Old drunkards of the neighborhood were always the bankers. They would hold the money in a torn cap. The women were deliberately provoked to this fighting. Sometimes a fight would spread to include a whole street. Shirt-sleeved men would join in, using brass knuckles and lead-tipped whips, and cartilages would crack and blood would flow. Then a patrol of Cossacks would ride up at a trot from Novyi Svet, where the administration of the mines and factories lived, and disperse the crowd with knouts.96

Workers themselves shared this picture of Donbass-Dnepr Bend streets. Polonskii noted in his memoirs that factory youths often fought on the streets just for the excitement of it.97 95 "Rotozei, ekskursiia znatnogo inostrantsa ν malovazhnyi russkii tsentr," in Ekatennoslavskii kalendar'—al'manakh na 1898god (Ekaterinoslav, 1897), p. 59. 96 Story of a Life, p. 430. 97 Polonskii, "Iz zhizni," p. 139; see also Brower, "Labor Violence."

WORKING-CLASS DAILY LIFE

89

Newspaper and memoir accounts of Donbass-Dnepr Bend workingclass cities and mining settlements paint a picture of a violent, lawless scene. The statistical evidence supports these accounts, but the statistics themselves present problems in analysis. Evidence from the justice of the peace court—the mirovoi sud, in which cases of muggings, public drunk­ enness, and brawling were heard—is unavailable. Judicial statistics from the circuit court—the okruzhnyi sud, which tried more serious cases of as­ sault, robbery, and murder—were published but are also problematical. Circuit-court statistics for convictions and acquittals include whole prov­ inces, making analysis of industrial centers and comparisons with other urban centers difficult. However, these crime statistics merit a brief exam­ ination. The court records indicate that Ekaterinoslav province's rate of violent crime was indeed high. During the years 1898 to 1906, the province had the second-highest number of convictions for murder (committed without any mitigating circumstances), assault, and murder resulting from the use of excessive force in fights (see table 3). The rate for these crimes was higher only in St. Petersburg province; and in the case of rape, Ekaterino­ slav exceeded even St. Petersburg. This is remarkable, considering that the level of urbanization in Ekaterinoslav province was far lower than in St. Petersburg.98 The statistics suggest that the level of violence in the indus­ trial cities of the Donbass-Dnepr Bend exceeded that in the central Rus­ sian industrial provinces of Moscow and Vladimir. Poltava, the least in­ dustrialized and urbanized of the five provinces examined, had a much lower level of violent crime.99 Popular violence was deeply ingrained in Russian lower-class culture. Street fights provided a favorite pastime and emotional outlet for the work­ ing class in the Donbass-Dnepr Bend. Of course, fighting has played this role to varying degrees almost everywhere workers have lived in similar conditions; furthermore, it was not a strictly working-class phenomenon. Daniel Brower has suggested, however, that Russia possessed an extraor­ dinary tradition of working-class violence.100 Unfortunately, the fragmen­ tary and impressionistic nature of the evidence to which Brower refers, as well as of that presented here, makes it difficult to assess the level of vio­ lence in the Donbass-Dnepr Bend in comparison with other Russian 98 The cities of St. Petersburg and Moscow accounted for 60 and 42 percent of the popu­ lation in their respective provinces in 1897. Only 12 percent of Ekaterinoslav province's pop­ ulation was urban (Thomas Stanley Fedor, Patterns of Urban Growth in the Russian Empire during the Nineteenth Century [Chicago, 1975], pp. 186-187). 99 For perspective, the absolute population figures from the 1897 census for these five prov­ inces are as follows: Poltava, 2,778,151; Moscow, 2,430,581; Ekaterinoslav, 2,113,674; St. Petersburg, 2,112,033; and Vladimir, 1,515,691. i°° "Labor Violence," pp. 417—453.

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TABLE 3

Provincial Crime Rates, 1898—1906 Category and Pravinu

Murder St. Petersburg Moscow Ekaterinoslav Vladimir Poltava Serious Assault St. Petersburg Moscow Ekaterinoslav Vladimir Poltava

Number cf Convictions

Percentage cf Total Convictions ftrr Category

Ranking per Capita

353 187 243 149 150

32.6 17.3 22.5 13.8 13.9

1 4

1,192

30.6 17.5 19.3 13.6 19.0

1 4

682

752 531 743

Rape St. Petersburg Moscow Ekaterinoslav Vladimir Poltava

73 37 77 45 31

27.7 14.1 29.3 17.1

Murder Resulting from Fights St. Petersburg Moscow Ekaterinoslav Vladimir Poltava

548 335 449 209 113

33.1 20.3 27.1

11.8

12.6

06.8

2

3 5

2

3 5

2

4 1 3 5

1 4

2

3 5

Source. Data for this table are derived from Svod stattstKbeshkb svederm opodsudtmykh, opravdannykh, t asuzhdetmyih (St. Petersburg, 1898-1906).

working-class regions. There is no question, however, that DonbassDnepr Bend workers partook of this national tradition with gusto. TTiis is supported by statistical evidence for the number of convictions for murders committed during fights. The number of defendants convicted of murder for using egregious force in fights (force considered unjustifiable on the grounds of self-defense) was extremely high in Ekaterinoslav province. On paydays or holidays, Donbass-Dnepr Bend workers not only drank to great excess, but also became extremely rowdy. Newspapers regularly reported on drunken brawls in ta%'erns, barracks, or wherever workers

WORKING-CLASS DAILY LIFE

91

gathered to celebrate their days off. Such brawls often spilled out onto the streets and resulted in serious injury, sometimes even growing into riots and looting.101 When Soviet historians in the early 1950s interviewed old Donbass-Dnepr Bend workers about their prerevolutionary life, many re­ called that "there were fights all the time."102 In working-class parishes, even church services were not immune from an occasional fistfight.103 An aside by a journalist covering the Donbass-Dnepr Bend labor movement in 1906 reveals just how expected it was that workers would fight during holidays. During the holidays that coincided with May Day that year, strikes and other labor disturbances were anticipated. When the day passed rather uneventfully, a newspaper report on the labor scene in Grushevka remarked that "the holidays passed peacefully, if one does not count the usual fights and other holiday amusements of the drunken crowd."104 The miner T. Kalashnikov recalled that during his days at the Briansk mine, "payday never passed without fights, which often ended in death. These fights would break out between lone individuals, artels, and even barracks. Such brawls resulted in broken windows, frames, and doors, injuries, and even death. Those guilty had to work off the damages."105 A promised fight was much anticipated. Workers engaged in the leastserious fights simply for "pleasure." These fights had more in common with boxing matches than mass brawls. Fighters simply rolled up their sleeves and went at each other, flailing away until one side was hurt badly enough to concede defeat. Workers considered such fights great entertainment. A well-placed blow elicited laughter and cheers from the onlookers. As in the case cited above, bets were placed on who would win. Spectators often expressed strong loyalties for one side or the other, in which case they were referred to as "patriots." They egged on their fellows until, in the case of a mass fight, they themselves joined in the fighting.106 In the absence of company-organized sports, payday and holiday fight­ ing often took the form of particularly brutal, ritualized brawls. The work­ ers' bigger, more-organized mass fights or brawls were called "wars." Only recendy have Western historians discussed such "wars," which had long been a part of Donbass-Dnepr Bend working-class life and lower-class cul­ ture elsewhere in the empire.107 The Donbass-Dnepr Bend workers who became Social Democrats and who were in a position to have their memVestnik Iuga, September 4, 1905, p. 5; Avdakov, "O merakh," p. 332; Iuzhnaia zaria, August 15, 1906, p. 3. 102 Zaks, tTrud i byt," p. 94. 103 Nikolaenko, Revoliutsionnoe dvizhente, p. 8. 104 Gomo-zavodskii listok, April 29,1906, p. 8487. los Kirzner, Gornorabochu, p. 16. 106 Kharlamov, Rozhdenie zavoda, p. 9. 107 See Brower, "Labor Violence"; and Neuberger, "Crime and Culture," chap. 2. 101

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oirs published (in the 1920s, following the Bolshevik Revolution) were reluctant to discuss the frequent and bloody working-class brawls. Kliment Voroshilov did so only after stating that "the truth is the truth" and con­ ceding that workers were "still far-from-conscious fighters for proletarian solidarity."108 One early Soviet historian of the Donbass-Dnepr Bend la­ bor movement, I. Nikolaenko, like Voroshilov worked in Lugansk in his youth. Later he remembered trying to ascertain the origin of workers' love for fighting there. He had asked some old-timers when and how such batdes had got their start. All they knew was that the "wars" were already a fixture in working-class life when they were young. Nikolaenko noted that just thinking about the "wars" clearly brought back fond memories and excited these old workers: "It was obvious from their faces that they burned with a desire to take part once again."109 One of the many everyday scuffles that broke out between young work­ ers during the course of any week might be sufficient to touch off a week­ end "war." In such instances, the weekday fight concluded with a pact to return en masse to battle on Sunday at some named hill or ravine outside town. During winter, a frozen river was the more appropriate arena for a brawl. In a "war," two opposing "walls" formed. The number of workers participating in these organized brawls could be staggeringly high, as those of "a quite venerable age" joined youths in one of the 'Svalls."110 The total number of fighters often reached a thousand or more. Rules for these 'Svars" existed; they were not supposed to be free-for-alls. For example, it was against the rules to use anything but one's fists, or to strike an oppo­ nent once he was down. But if the two sides became agitated, as was usual, the fighters quickly abandoned any pretense of observing rules. A short description of a typical "war" makes it obvious how participants might become agitated. At first the two sides lined up opposite one an­ other, content to stand and hurl insults across a neutral zone. The actual 'Svar" usually began when one of the younger workers, a teenager, threw a rock at the opposing side. This elicited a like response, and before long rivets and nuts as well as rocks were flying back and forth. Inevitably, someone received a serious head wound. Just as predictably, tempers then flared and both sides charged the middle with what appeared to be a wild disregard for the risks. In the hand-to-hand combat that followed, if the sense of grievance or hatred was strong, one could expect to see chains and knives. Such fighting often ended in serious wounds and fatalities.111 Rasskazy ο zhizni, pp. 121-122. Rcvoliutsionnoe dvizhenie, p. 7. 110 Voroshilov, Rasskazy ozhizni, p. 121. 111 V. M. Stanislavskii, "K voprosu ο sanitamykh usloviiakh zhilishch gomorabochikh Donetskogo raiona," Vracbebno-sanitarnaia khronika Ekaterinoslavskoijjubernii, no. 10 (October 108

109

WORKING-CLASS DAILY LIFE

93

The Donbass-Dnepr Bend "wars" often pitted mine against neighbor­ ing mine or factory against factory.112 In these instances, fighting might be seen as helping to cement bonds within an enterprise. But these were not the only divisions within the working class that determined who fought whom in 'Svars." Whatever the pretext or reason for a particular 'Svar," be it a petty scuffle or a long-planned confrontation, working-class fighting often expressed ethnic and regional animosities. The "wars," as well as the smaller brawls, usually pitted zemliaki (workers from the same province or region) against workers from another province—the workers from Tula, for example, against those from Smolensk. As has been noted, this sort of clannishness provided the mass of workers in the Donbass-Dnepr Bend with their primary social identity and support. "Wars" sometimes pitted one worker barrack against another. This, too, often reflected zemliak allegiances, since Donbass-Dnepr Bend barracks commonly were segre­ gated along ethnic and regional lines. Serious fights also tended to pit the major ethnic groups against one another. In these batdes, groups of mi­ grant Great Russian workers might unite to fight against fellow workers who were Tatars or Ukrainians, or against the neighboring Ukrainian peasants. According to Nikolaenko (no doubt guilty here of Ukrainian chauvinism), during holidays in Lugansk, in the fights held near the Hartmann factory, four or five Ukrainian city toughs could get the better of up to twenty-five Russians.113 In brawls, and in other contexts, ethnic and regional animosities split the Donbass-Dnepr Bend working class asun­ der.114 Brawls were just one of the many forms in which this disunity surfaced. The authorities responded quite casually to the brawls, preoccupied as they were with protecting property and maintaining order in the city cen­ ters. Typically, the police showed no interest in stopping workers' "wars" and did not intervene until battles were on the wane. If the mounted police happened to gallop up when one or the other side of combatants had yet to gain the upper hand, they would stop and try to bide their time if the fighting was still fierce. Even so, the police sometimes misjudged when it was safe to make a move toward dispersing the crowd and perhaps securing a handful of arrests. The police then got caught in the middle and often were forced into an embarrassing retreat. The police were as impotent in 1909): 470; Nikolaenko, Revoliutsumnoe dvtzhente, pp. 6-7; Kharlamov,Rozhdeniezavoda, p. 9; Voroshilov, Rasskazy ο zhizni, p. 121. 112 Zaks, "Trud i byt," p. 94. 113 Rtvoliutswnnoe dvizhente, pp. 6-7, 12. 114 Kirzner, Gornorabochie, p. 16; Zaitsev, "Bol'sheviki Iuzovki," p. 156; Lisscr, "Gornorabochie," p. 749; Kharlamov, Rozhdmie zavoda, p. 9; TsGAOR, DP OO, f. 102, d. 4, ch. 18, 1. A (Volnenitakh i stachkakh sredi rabodnkh ν Ekatennoslavskot gubcrnu, gendarme report, April 27, 1899), pp. 15-17.

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quelling the politically nonthreatening violence of large-scale workingclass fighting as they proved to be when it came to controlling factory ri­ oting or pogroms.115

By the turn of the twentieth century, the days when Donbass-Dnepr Bend cities and towns could all be described as sleepy backwaters were long gone. The industrial boom brought a rough new world in its wake, and the Donbass-Dnepr Bend became notorious for its squalid, menacing working-class setdements. Peasant migrants arriving to work in the re­ gion's relatively well paying mining and metallurgical enterprises entered burgeoning cities and company towns suffering from overcrowding, in­ adequate public services, and rampant crime. The grave social problems racking Donbass-Dnepr Bend industrial centers often were a focus of con­ cern on the part of the local authorities and social elite; but, not surpris­ ingly, tsarist Russia proved unequal to the task of alleviating the strains resulting from rapid industrialization and urbanization, leaving workers' health and welfare at serious risk. The time spent brawling and "in a drunken stupor, with stinking, infected whores" (as one writer delicately put it),116 only further increased the sickness and death Donbass-Dnepr Bend miners and steelworkers already suffered from bad drinking water; woefully inadequate toilet and sewage facilities; filthy, parasite-infested, and crammed housing; and the most dangerous jobs in industry. Private educational and cultural programs enjoyed some support, but the earnest efforts to "civilize" the new mass of workers had litde impact. Workers continued to seek escape from their heavy lot in drunkenness, prostitutes, gambling, and fighting. And as we will now see, their discontent with con­ ditions in the Donbass-Dnepr Bend boiled over into collective forms of mass unrest as well. To his colleagues at the ministry of internal affairs, finance minister Sergei Witte's greatest economic success—the develop­ ment of the Donbass-Dnepr Bend—presented an equally great source of trouble. Nikolaenko, KevoliutsUmnoc dvizhenie, p. 7. P. Surozhskii, "Krai uglia i zheleza," Sopretnennik, no. 4 (1913): 308, quoted in W. Bruce Lincoln, Passage through Armageddon: TheRusstans in War ami Revolution, 19141918 (New York, 1986), p. 223. 115

116

PartTwo THE LABOR AND REVOLUTIONARY MOVEMENTS

4 Late-Nineteenth-Century Unrest All of cultured society has experienced the moral and material harm caused by mass temnota [benighted ignorance]. From time to time because of the temnota of the bottom strata of the worker population, the city is hit with ghastly Jewish pogroms, plagues such as cholera, and other disorders. (Ekaterinoslav Commission finPopular Readings)

UNTIL THE first years of the twentieth century, workers in the DonbassDnepr Bend, like workers throughout the Russian empire, offered little encouragement to those who sought to base a revolution on the discontent of a class-conscious proletariat. During the late nineteenth century, the la­ bor movement in the Donbass-Dnepr Bend—as throughout Russia—ex­ hibited few signs that the rise of a coordinated mass movement might be imminent, even though many revolutionary activists worked hard to mine the rich veins of worker discontent. In the decades preceding the 1903 general strike and the 1905 Revolution, workers in the Donbass-Dnepr Bend, as elsewhere in Russia, displayed their capacity for collective action only on rare occasions. When unrest did occur, it was exceptionally explo­ sive and violent. During the initial stages of the Donbass-Dnepr Bend boom, most workers appeared to have resigned themselves to enduring the hardships without protest. While boisterous among themselves, workers generally appeared docile and deferential before their bosses, behavior characteristic of the Russian peasantry. Their employers, like the nobility back in the countryside, expected as much. For a worker to smoke a cigarette or fail to remove his hat in the presence of an administrator was viewed as insolent insubordination.1 As late as the mid-1890s, most "conscious" workers con­ sidered the prospects for organizing their fellow workers into a unified, powerful force to be all but hopeless. One such activist, Georgii Petrovskii, later recalled how workers were so embroiled in an "animalistic struggle 1 Fenin,

Vospominaniw, p. 53.

98

CHAPTER 4

for survival" that they "almost entirely lacked solidarity and cohesion in the struggle against oppression at the factory."2 Of course, workers lacked any legal means to seek redress. The tsarist government denied Russian work­ ers the safety valves widely available to workers in the West: the right to organize into trade unions and bargain collectively with their employers. The tsarist government viewed any strike as a revolutionary act. Russians who walked off the job to rectify some wrong or to improve wages were engaged in a serious matter. Not only did workers lose wages and risk being fired, strikes invited the possibility of prison.3 Local governmental authorities did not hesitate to call in troops to end "the disorders" and arrest ringleaders. Uncommitted to a permanent life in the mines or mills and intent on accumulating some money quickly, the mass of migrants generally did not find appeals to strike attractive. Workers most commonly expressed their discontent by simply quitting their jobs individually and either moving to another job or returning to their home village. Although laboring in mines and mills produced some worker solidarity, high turnover, coupled with the subdivision of workers into separate mine chambers and factory de­ partments and into separate ethno-regional groups, made it extremely dif­ ficult for workers at a mine or mill to organize a strike committee that could set a date, draw up demands, and mobilize the support of the com­ pany's labor force, all the while escaping management's notice. It was no easier for members of the revolutionary underground. Migrants brought to Donbass-Dnepr Bend industry peasants' traditional distrust of "out­ siders."4 One should also keep in mind that, hard as life was in the mills and mines, most workers compared it to life in the poverty-stricken Russian countryside. Those recruited into the Donbass-Dnepr Bend labor force had long been inured to physical hardships and privations. Yet, at the same time, the generally fatalistic and submissive Russian peasantry was famous for occasionally resolving en masse to endure no more. Violence then erupted and swept across the countryside, with peasants sacking noble es­ tates and raping and killing their inhabitants. Those recruited to work in Donbass-Dnepr Bend industry brought this tradition of rebellion with them to the mines and mills, along with their outward obsequiousness. G. I. Petrovskii, "S 1893 g. po 1905 g."Iitoriia ckatmnoslavskoi, p. 49. convicted of instigating a strike that resulted in property damage and included threats against unwilling workers faced jail sentences of eight to sixteen months (Ascher, Revolution of1905, p. 22; Gaston V. Rimlingcr, "The Management of Labor Protest in Tsarist Russia, 1870-1905,"International Review ofSocial History 5 [I960]: 226-248). * In the countryside, peasants distrusted everyone outside their own commune, beginning with peasants in the neighboring village (Robert Edelman, Proletarian Peasants: The Revolu­ tion rf 1905 in Russia's Southwest [Ithaca, N.Y., 1987]). 2

3 Workers

LATE-NINETEENTH-CENTURY UNREST

99

The threat of labor violence hung over the Donbass-Dnepr Bend through­ out the period covered in this study. As we will see, when migrant workers considered risking illegal action, rioting was often the favored form of action. Donbass-Dnepr Bend labor unrest did slowly take root soon after the first large, foreign-owned coal mine opened. From 1873 until the last years of the century, the number and size of disturbances and work stoppages grew with the development of heavy industry. During the 1870s and 1880s, growing labor discontent in the region was mainly confined to iso­ lated disturbances in mining settlements. In the 1890s, when the metallur­ gical as well as the mining industries grew so dramatically, DonbassDnepr Bend workers increasingly began to shake off their docility. As steelworkers became active, the pace of outbreaks of worker unrest quick­ ened. Most major instances of labor unrest in the region during the last decades of the nineteenth century occurred at the Briansk steel mill in Ekaterinoslav or at the mines and mills owned by the New Russia Company in Iuzovka. In addition, Donbass-Dnepr Bend artisans increasingly orga­ nized strikes "over narrow, everyday needs and interests." As the veteran Ekaterinoslav Social Democrat I. Kh. Lalaiants recalled, Jewish artisans proved more receptive to revolutionary agitators. "So far as such strikes ended successfully, they aroused others to follow suit."5 However, the small number of workers involved even in the larger artisanal strikes and the fact that these strikers were artisans and generally Jewish led revolu­ tionaries to place litde stock in such strikes as the foundation for a larger revolutionary movement. To understand working-class consciousness in the Donbass-Dnepr Bend, it is important to examine how the mass of miners and steelworkers expressed their discontent. Historians of other Russian regions have em­ phasized the nonviolent character of Russian labor unrest during the late nineteenth century.6 In the Donbass-Dnepr Bend, while labor unrest usu­ ally consisted of brief, nonviolent work stoppages, destructive riots also were common. Workers' readiness to resort to violence proved to be the feature that most distinguished the labor movement in the DonbassDnepr Bend during the late nineteenth century. On a number of occasions, particularly in the 1890s, workers expressed their discontent in enormous outbursts of violent, destructive rioting. Spontaneously, without any pre­ liminary discussion or clear leadership, workers en masse broke windows, destroyed machines, looted shops, and assaulted any factory foremen, 5 Lalaiants, "O moikh vstrechakh," p. 60. Because artisanal employees recognized that their employers could not significantly raise wages and remain in business, given the uncompctitiveness of most artisanal workshops with factory production, artisans focused their efforts on reducing the length of their workday rather than on increasing wages. 6 See, for example, Johnson, Peasant and Proletarian.

CHAPTER 4

100

guards, and managers or any neighboring Jews they could get their hands on. The growth of the socialist movement during the 1880s and 1890s (which is examined in the next chapter) failed to produce a "conscious" labor movement during the late nineteenth century. The industrial boom meant that the few "acclimatized workers" were swamped by waves of "new, uncultured elements,"7 who were still intent in the late 1890s on expressing their discontent in "arson, murder, and the destruction of ma­ chines and buildings."8 The early Soviet historian M. A. Rubach referred to the 1898 "riot" (bunt) at the Briansk factory in Ekaterinoslav as the "highest expression of the whole epoch . . . the epoch of the spontaneous movement."9 Ekaterinoslav province was the only province the ministry of internal affairs placed in a state of "heightened security" (usilennaia okhrana) during tike 1890s (joining the six provinces in this state since 1881).10 According to Soviet figures, such as those compiled by O. A. Parasun'ko and shown in table 4, the Donbass-Dnepr Bend labor movement during the late nineteenth century was dominated quantitatively by nonviolent work stoppages. While large-scale rioting distinguished the DonbassDnepr Bend labor movement from labor movements elsewhere in Russia, most labor disturbances in the region were relatively nonviolent during this period.11 To divide this unrest into the two separate categories of TABLE4

Number of Strikes and Riots in Ekaterinoslav Province, 1870-1899 1870-1875 1876-1880 1881-1885 1886-1890 1891-1895 1896-1899

Strikes

Riots

8 2 8 20 14 107

3 0 0 3 6 9

Source·. Compiled from tables in O. A. Parasun'ko, Polozhtnie i bor'ba rabochejjo klassa Ukrainy, 1860-90-egodyXIXv. (Kiev, 1963), pp. 282, 390, 393, 562. 7 G. Novopolin, "Iz istorii rabochego dvizheniia (1800-1903)," Leu/pis' revoliutsit, no. 2 (1923), p. 22. 8 Istoriia ekaterinoslavskot, p. xxiii. 9 Ibid., p. xxii. 10 The state of "heightened security" gave Ekaterinosla^s governor the power to suspend civil liberties and personally fine or incarcerate offenders "to preserve state order and public tranquility" (Robbins, The Tsar's Viceroys, pp. 181-182). 11 It is clear, however, that Soviet sources have minimized the extent of worker violence. To give just one example, in the listing of incidents of labor unrest in Rabochee dvizhente ν

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strikes and riots, or disturbances (volnentta), is, however, somewhat mis­ leading. Soviet historians' use of the two distinct categories to differentiate types of working-class protest obscures the extent to which strikes and riots overlapped. Work stoppages in the Donbass-Dnepr Bend during this pe­ riod commonly included some destruction, rocks thrown through win­ dows, personal attacks, and looting of shops; or, to look at it conversely, working-class riots often began as nonviolent work stoppages. Even ac­ cording to Parasun'ko's figures, during most of this period (from 1880 to 1894), 40,750 workers in Ekaterinoslav province rioted, compared to the 15,480 workers who participated in strikes.12 Donbass-Dnepr Bend labor actions, especially in the early years, gener­ ally followed a few basic patterns. They usually did not involve an enter­ prise's entire work force, but rather one department or even just a group of workers. In most instances, they lasted only one to three days. Typically, after refusing to start work or stopping during a shift, disgrunded workers gathered in front of the company office to confront a company represen­ tative with their grievances. The tsarist government's prohibition of trade unions, and even of open meetings to air grievances, largely explains why the workers in such instances did not present written lists of demands. The exchange between the assembled workers and the enterprise representative commonly resembled a shouting match. Such strikes were most likely to occur in the spring, especially after the mines announced their spring-sum­ mer pay rate.13 Given that most workers were peasant migrants who viewed themselves as short-term workers, issues concerning pay not sur­ prisingly provoked more strikes than any other cause.14 As in the case of artisans, miners and steelworkers also struck over the length of the work­ day or the length of their lunch and other breaks, or to improve some other aspect of working conditions. Many work stoppages were defensive in Rossii ν XDC veke, the large-scale riot in 1898 at the Briansk mill in Ekaterinoslav was labeled a strike (Rabochee dvizhente ν Rossti ρ XIX veke: Sbornik dokumtntov i materialov, vol. 4, ed. L. M. Ivanov [Moscow-Leningrad, 1963], pt. 2:776). Itwasastudyofthischronicleoflabor unrest that led Robert Johnson to conclude in Peasant and Proletarian that Russian labor unrest was disciplined and nonviolent. See also Brower, "Labor Violence"; and Joan Neuberger, "Hooliganism: Crime, Culture, and Power in Imperial Russia, St. Petersburg, 19001914" (unpublished manuscript). 12 Polozhenie i bor'ba, p. 393. According to Parasun'ko's figures, from 1895 to 1899 far more workers struck than rioted—82,248 compared to 11,168 (ibid., p. 562). But the failure by the tsarist government, Donbass—Dnepr Bend management, and Soviet historians to in­ clude many working-class riots as instances of labor unrest makes quantitative analysis based on these statistics of dubious value. The statistics can be considered only a general indicator of some trends in the labor movement. 13 Coal-mine operators' failure to fulfill anticipated pay hikes in the spring had produced unrest ever since the construction of the first large mines in the 1870s (ibid., p. 255). 14 Issues concerning pay, of course, provoked unrest throughout industrial Russia, includ­ ing regions with less worker turnover.

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character. Workers stopped work to protest the lowering of the piece rate or an increase in overtime work. Less predictable sources of discontent also triggered labor actions. Workers repeatedly were spurred into action when their enterprise did not receive its payroll on time and therefore could not distribute wages on the agreed-upon day. By the end of the century, a foreman's insults could also be sufficient cause for workers to walk off the job, especially if the foreman was a foreigner. Roughly half the work stoppages of the period achieved some conces­ sions from the firm, as was the case in Grushev in 1879 at the mines owned by the Russian Steamship and Trade Company (ROPIT). With a work force of about a thousand miners, the Grushev coal mines were among the largest in the region at the time.15 After the strike began, some of ROPFFs miners seized the company's scales and surrounded the home of the mine engineer. The strikers claimed the company cheated them by using scales that underweighed the amount of coal they mined, and they refused to return to work until the mine paid them what they insisted they were due. In an unusually long strike, the mine stayed closed for five days. Cossacks ultimately were called in and the strike ended, but a government investi­ gation upheld the workers' claims.16 At a few mines, work stoppages apparently became regular seasonal rit­ uals. The mine engineer Aleksandr Fenin recalled in his memoirs that when he managed the Makeevka mine in the 1890s, it was an annual spring event for workers at the mine to strike before Whitsunday, or the Troitsa holiday. Each year, according to this unusual account, during the week before the holiday, most of the mine's work force packed up their paltry belongings and moved from the company barracks to the open steppe outside the min­ ing village. There the miners set up camp. Entire families joined the move. The strike often lasted a full week, during which time the miners, accord­ ing to Fenin, "spent the evenings playing cards, wildly hooting, whistling, and cavorting about" as if the strike were some sort of annual festival. Fenin "would tell them their demands were unreasonable—that wages had been set at Easter for the whole summer and they had agreed to them." One might assume the strike tradition at the Makeevka mine stemmed from an initial success, but it continued year after year under Fenin's man­ agement, even though the mine refused to make any concessions to the strikers. (Perhaps it was a de facto demand for vacation time.) Each year the workers eventually conceded defeat and peacefully returned to the bar15 Mines were, of course, much bigger in later years. In 1900 the South Russian Coal Company employed 6,430 workers at its mines near Gorlovka, and the New Russia Company employed 5,839 at its mines near Iuzovka (Potolov, RabocbteDonbassa, p. 125). 16 Ibid., p. 184.

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racks, although once it was necessary for Cossacks to make an appearance before they finally broke camp.17 For Donbass-Dnepr Bend miners to walk off the job and close down a mine during this period for as long as five days, as they also did in the ROPIT work stoppage, was rare. Before the great strike waves of 1903 and 1905, the government could quickly deploy troops to quell labor un­ rest. Lacking organized leadership, workers had difficulty sustaining a strike. Work stoppages were often so brief management did not even bother to report them to governmental authorities. A short work stoppage with some relatively minor destruction did bring egregious abuses out into the open and often succeeded in rectifying gross mistreatment, but such actions rarely achieved major changes or wage increases. Generally, in­ stances of labor unrest in the Donbass-Dnepr Bend during the late nine­ teenth century lacked continuity with previous strikes and occurred in iso­ lation. For Donbass-Dnepr Bend workers to establish any continuity from year to year was extremely difficult, given the labor force's transience. Many peaceful work stoppages were quickly transformed into destruc­ tive riots. When faced with a crowd of angry workers, management invari­ ably demanded that workers select representatives from their ranks so that orderly negotiations could be conducted, a demand workers usually re­ jected. Past experience had taught them that following the restoration of order, the worker representatives were likely to be singled out and arrested for instigating the strike.18 At this critical juncture, if no concessions from management were forthcoming and workers refused to end the strike— and troops or Cossacks had not yet arrived—workers often began to riot. Management generally could pacify workers by adopting delaying tac­ tics that paid lip service to the workers' demands. Confident of government support and workers' normal obsequiousness and quiescence, management told workers their demands had merit and would be granted if at all pos­ sible. Management correcdy believed that if it could temporarily defuse the crowd, real concessions could be avoided in most cases. Such tactics were risky, though. A crowd of agitated workers often saw the management's false promises for what they were, and their anger and frustration exploded in destruction and looting. It was in this way that work stoppages in the Donbass-Dnepr Bend could evolve into drunken rampages marked by ar­ son, machine smashing, and personal attacks. These factory or mine upris­ ings were more akin to the traditional, uncoordinated, and terrifying out­ bursts of Russian rural violence known as bunts than to strikes seeking 17 Fenin,

Vospomitumiia, pp. 51—52. For management and the police to ask workers to elect representatives for negotiations, only to fire or arrest these representatives after order was restored, was common throughout Russia. See Oskar Anweiler, The Soviets: The Russian Workers, Peasants, and Soldiers Councils, 1905-1921, trans. Ruth Hein (New York, 1974), p. 24. 18

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specific and limited economic gains. Taverns and shops (especially those owned by Jews), as well as mine and factory property, might be attacked. During most of these riots, the amount of damage workers wreaked was fairly modest. Labor unrest in the Donbass-Dnepr Bend during the 1870s and 1880s erupted among the work crews laying the railroad lines, but it was concen­ trated at the mines owned by foreigners. The New Russia Company, the enterprise that Welshman John Hughes had opened in the early 1870s, was a primary target. Just as the New Russia Company had pioneered the for­ eign industrial development of the region, the miners and steelworkers em­ ployed by this company proved to be "the pioneers of Donbass-Dnepr Bend mass actions."19 Work stoppages repeatedly occurred there and often culminated in attacks on shops, taverns, and company offices.20 One incident at the New Russia Company's mines provides a classic ex­ ample of the disturbances in the Donbass-Dnepr Bend labor movement during this early period. On April 12, 1875, the New Russia Company faced an agitated work force when payday arrived and the company lacked the funds necessary to pay its workers. Because of their isolation, DonbassDnepr Bend enterprises frequently failed to receive their payroll on time, which understandably outraged workers and always created the possibility of serious trouble.21 Paydays were a much-anticipated time of drinking and carousing—especially for employees at a company such as the New Russia Company, which illegally paid its workers only once every two months. In this particular instance, the mine administration temporarily pacified its infuriated miners and steelworkers by paying each of them a few rubles and assuring them their wages were sure to arrive within a few days. The workers demonstrated unusual patience, but their mood became increasingly agitated as two weeks passed and they still had not received their pay. Workers began to stay away from work, and many threatened to quit. Following work on Saturday, April 26, a group of the miners made the short trip from the mines to the New Russia Company's main office, which was located at the company's steel mill in Iuzovka. Some of the fac­ tory workers there joined the miners, who assembled inside the factory office to demand immediate payment of their wages. They declared "they would not leave the office until they were paid, since they did not have any money and no one would lend them any."22 They did leave after nightfall, but they returned to occupy the office again the next day. Hughes's pro­ posal to give them an authorized note for credit purchases at the local Potolov, Rabochie Dtmbassa, p. 179. Kharechko, "Sotsial-dcmokraticheskii soiuz," p. 9; Parasun'ko, Pohzhenie i bor'ba, pp. 255-257. 21 TsGIA, f. 37, op. 58, d. 307, p. 7. 22 Police report, quoted in Potolov, Raboehte Donbassa, p. 183. 19

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shops touched a sore spot and only angered the workers more. The work­ ers felt local merchants exploited them by inflating prices on credit pur­ chases. They believed that in purchases with these credit notes, "they would lose at least half."23 The agitated miners and factory workers finally had had enough and went on a drunken rampage, attacking first the com­ pany administration. They broke the windows of the Hughes family man­ sion. Otherwise, the workers did not damage company property. Hughes and the other British members of the administration managed to hide and escape personal attack before the workers turned to looting taverns and small shops at the city market. The payroll finally arrived a few days later and the wages were issued, but not before troops had been called in for protection and thirty workers arrested.24 Except for the 1883 pogrom (discussed below), a strike in 1887 at the mines of the Rutchenko Coal Company in Rutchenkovka was the first large-scale labor disturbance in the Donbass-Dnepr Bend. For the first time, Donets Basin miners demonstrated considerable organization and solidarity. The Rutchenkovka strike began after the mine announced that during the summer season miners would earn twenty-two kopecks per wagon of coal, up just two kopecks from the twenty paid during the win­ ter. Workers had expected more, and on May 4, four hundred miners working in the company's eastern mine—mine No. 19—struck. Con­ fronted with a closed mine, the administration agreed to pay twenty-four kopecks per wagon at the mine. Still not satisfied, the five artels of migrants from Smolensk province who had instigated the strike demanded twentyfive kopecks.25 When the administration refused, the strikers marched round to the western mines, Nos. 11 and 13, which prompdy joined the strike. The next day, almost the entire fifteen hundred workers employed at the Rutchenko mines assembled in front of the mine office. In addition to more pay, the workers demanded that the administration fire a para­ medic (fel'dsher) and some contractors and foremen hated for how they treated workers, and that the sale of inferior meat at the company store be stopped. A mine spokesman, a Frenchman by the name of Vensage, ad­ dressed the miners. To soothe the workers and defuse the threat of vio­ lence, Vensage agreed to all the strikers' demands, a promise he evidently had no intention of fulfilling. The next day, May 6, when the mine believed it had regained control over its work force, the administration not only reneged on its promises, Report of the mine engineer Lebedev, quoted in Potolov, Rabochie Donbassa, p. 183. Levus, "Iz istorii," p. 50. 25 Iu. Z. Polevoi, Zemizhdenie markstzma ν Rami, 1883-1894 (Moscow, 1959), pp. 105— 106. Here we see an example of how zemliachestvo facilitated outbreaks of labor unrest. Rob­ ert Johnson concluded in his study of Moscow province that "clusters of zemliakt formed a nucleus out of which grew larger strikes" (Peasant and Proletarian, p. 159). 23 24

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but also fired the workers thought to be responsible for the strike. That night, an outraged crowd of miners went on a rampage. Armed with kaili, the hacks used for mining, the crowd attacked the company office. After breaking the office's windows and furniture, the miners decided to move on to the company's brewery and nearby taverns and inns. At the first tav­ ern, workers who were opposed to this turn of events and sought to avoid drunkenness among the strikers smashed the vodka barrel, but the mass of workers were not to be denied. They simply proceeded to the brewery, where they reportedly drank thirty-two hundred gallons of beer!26 Later that night, many of the miners managed to make the five-verst trek to Iuzovka, where they hoped to loot and induce steelworkers at the New Rus­ sia Company to join their protest. In Iuzovka, the New Russia Company thwarted the miners by success­ fully pitting steelworker against miner, foreigner against Russian.27 At the behest of Arthur Hughes himself, son of the founder, the company armed with guns and put on horseback fifty steelworkers, mosdy highly paid skilled workers imported from England. They charged the miners and sent them running.28 The next day, EkaterinoslaVs vice-governor and two battalions of sol­ diers arrived in Rutchenkovka and put an end to the disorders there, as well as the small protests and disturbances that the Rutchenko miners' up­ rising had sparked at nearby mines. The unrest succeeded in drawing the governments attention to the miners' grievances, but mass arrests rather than improvements followed. In his report, Ekaterinoslav's governor sup­ ported the mine. Instead of blaming working and living conditions for this outburst of worker discontent, His Excellency emphasized the peasant or­ igins of the miners, arguing that the miners brought to the mines the trou­ bles of the central Russian village.29 24 G. Novopolin, "Pcrvyc 'bezporiadki' gornorabochikh (1887)," Leu/pis' rcvoliutrii, no. 2 (1923): 11. 27 This was a tactic the company had successfully employed earlier, in 1874 (Parasun'ko, Polozhenie i bor'ba, p. 256). 28 Despite their role in this incident, the skilled foreign workers employed in the DonbassDnepr Bend commonly encouraged Russian workers to question the tsarist order. I. Shevchenko later recounted how he and ten or so other teenage boys went to work early each day to listen "with bated breath" to a skilled German worker tell stories "about foreign cities and the lives workers lived in other countries" and discuss the advantages of a democratic form of government. When rumors spread that government officials had authorized three days of pogromist looting, the German "persuaded not only us, but adults as well" to not participate (I. Shevchcnko, "Moi vospominaniia," Istonia ckatcrinoslavskoi, pp. 56-57). 29TsGAOR, DP OO, f. 102, 1896, d. 606, ch. 3, pp. 23-24; Gessen, Istoriiasornorabochikh, pp. 124-126; Potolov, Rabochie Donbassa, pp. 200-203; Novopolin, "Pervye 'bezpo­ riadki,' "pp. 10-11. The troops arrested all 366 workers at Rutchenko mine No. 19; 62 of them had to stand trial, while the rest were sent home to their native villages.

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Government officials often evaluated the situation differendy. When late-nineteenth-century work stoppages and riots achieved improvements in working conditions, it was usually due to government pressure on the enterprise. In their desire to ensure that disorders not be repeated, govern­ ment officials often took the workers' side. This had been the Rutchenko workers' hope, as a local gendarme official noted after the riot. "Not know­ ing where to turn for help and protection, the workers decided to protest all together, not separately. . . they presume that they will be punished for the disorders but at the very least others will understand their situation and improve it, even if just a litde."30 Social Democrats later evaluated as "backward" such incidents as the work stoppage and small riot by the workers at the New Russia Company in 1875 and at the Rutchenko mines in 1887. Social Democrats judged the labor movement to be in its infancy, since discontented workers rioted. This evaluation of the Donbass-Dnepr Bend labor movement was strongly influenced by three much larger violent outbreaks of labor unrest (which will be examined below). G. Novopolin, a social-democratic activist who wrote one of the first Soviet historical accounts of the Donbass-Dnepr Bend revolutionary movement, expressed the interpretation Social Dem­ ocrats generally shared at the time. Novopolin argued that the composition of the work force in the Donbass-Dnepr Bend in the late nineteenth cen­ tury kept the labor movement from rising above a "primitive" level: Skilled workers . . . were drowned in an uncultured mass of chernorabochie . . . but because working conditions in the "blessed" south differed litde from con­ ditions in the north, before long the labor movement in the south also assumed a revolutionary character. The revolutionary mood, because of the uncultured and unconscious character of the mass of workers, assumed at first a violent and pogromist character, which the isolated intelligenty and conscious workers failed to control or direct into proper channels.31

To appreciate the Social Democrats' view that the Donbass-Dnepr Bend labor movement could easily degenerate into riotous violence, a view that persisted among Social Democrats into the twentieth century and that in­ fluenced tactical decisions during "revolutionary situations," it is necessary to place the late-nineteenth-century Donbass-Dnepr Bend labor move­ ment in the larger context of other forms of collective working-class vio­ lence besides strikes and work stoppages. 30 Rabochcc dvizhcnie νRossii ν XJX veke, vol. 3, ed. A. M. Fankratova (Moscow, 1963), pt. 1:503, quoted in Brower, "Labor Violence," p. 421. 31 "Iz istorii rabochego dvizheniia," pp. 16-17.

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In addition to the rioting that often accompanied work stoppages in the Donbass—Dnepr Bend, on a few occasions during the late nineteenth cen­ tury, worker discontent erupted in violent rampages unconnected to any attempt to first pursue peaceful means. These labor actions were atypical, but they reveal a side of the Russian working class that has been little ap­ preciated since that era. At the time, radical organizers in the DonbassDnepr Bend continually denounced workers' proclivity for destruction and violence. Social Democrats particularly thought such mass actions hurt the labor movement. They viewed riots as mindless outbursts that posed no threat to the social or political order. Management and government au­ thorities were not so sure. But despite government repression and radicals' efforts to curb workers' violence, this side of labor unrest would continue to play a role during the revolutionary years 1903-1905. Three major outbursts of working-class violence and rioting occurred in the Donbass-Dnepr Bend during the last two decades of the nineteenth century—in 1883, 1892, and 1898. Each of these powerful displays of labor violence attracted national attention because the rampaging workers wreaked enormous destruction and because the riots were pogroms—vio­ lence directed at local Jews and Jewish enterprises. The first riot occurred in 1883 in Ekaterinoslav. Unlike the other two, this was a classic pogrom, the last big rampage in the wave of pogroms that rolled across southern Russia during the early 1880s.32 Although this pogrom has not been con­ sidered a working-class disturbance, it should be. Workers constituted the bulk of the rioters; and when seen in the context of the labor movement, the pogrom clearly shares many features of later Donbass-Dnepr Bend la­ bor disturbances. This is not to diminish the importance of anti-Semitism in the origins of the 1883 pogrom. On the contrary, viewing the pogrom in the context of labor unrest indicates the depth of anti-Semitism among Donbass-Dnepr Bend workers and the reason anti-Semitism could assume such importance in other labor disturbances. In the 1883 pogrom, Don­ bass-Dnepr Bend workers displayed the violent and pogromist proclivities that characterized labor unrest there on many later occasions. The other two major nineteenth-century Donbass-Dnepr Bend riots, which oc­ curred in Iuzovka in 1892 and in Ekaterinoslav in 1898, were by contrast always recognized as instances of labor unrest. Worker anger at govern­ ment handling of an epidemic in 1892 and at factory guards in 1898 pro­ voked these two rampages, which both then degenerated into pogromist 32 Prior to the wave of pogroms that began in 1881, only three relatively small-scale po­ groms had erupted in Russia. All three occurred in the city of Odessa, in 1820, 1859, and 1871 (Louis Greenberg, The Jews in Russia: The Struggle for Emancipation, vol. 2 [New Ha­ ven, 1951], p. 19).

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violence against Jews. All three of these mass labor actions will be exam­ ined in detail below. They established patterns of working-class violence that link labor unrest and pogroms. They also provide background for un­ derstanding the political consciousness of Donbass-Dnepr Bend workers and the crucial political events of 1903 and 1905. The first of these riots occurred in July 1883 on the streets of Ekaterinoslav. Because the pogrom occurred in the early stages of the industrializa­ tion drive, the migrant workers from central Russia who accounted for the bulk of the pogromists were railroad workers, rather than miners or steelworkers. The construction of the Ekaterinin railroad line through Ekaterinoslav in the early 1880s brought thousands of migrant workers to the city and surrounding area. Until recently, students of pogroms showed litde interest in discovering who actually participated in pogroms. Outraged by the pattern of Cos­ sacks' and troops' refusal to protect the Jewish populace from rampaging mobs, most scholars concentrated on trying to demonstrate local and cen­ tral government involvement. But rather than being directed from on high, the pogroms of the early 1880s occurred in several spontaneous waves. I. AIichael Aronson has convincingly showed that the pogroms spread spontaneously from towns to setdements to villages, moving along rail­ road lines, major highways, and rivers. Railroad workers were primarily responsible for spreading the pogroms throughout the Ukraine, but they were joined by other migrant workers, peasants, and lower-middle-class business competitors of the Jews.33 Ekaterinoslav was one of Russia's major Jewish centers. Jews accounted for over a third (35.4 percent) of the city's population by 1897. The Jewish presence in Ekaterinoslav was greater than the numbers suggest. Jews were the most setded inhabitants among the city's population. While Great Rus­ sians constituted the largest ethnic group, with 41.8 percent, this number included many of the community's most transient members—notably workers and garrisoned soldiers. And while most of Ekaterinoslav5S Jews were poor artisans and petty traders, Jews also played a leading role in the city's commerce, with a handful of wealthy Jews attaining social and civic prominence.34 33 "Geographical and Socioeconomic Factors," p. 31. Aronson argues that the 1881 po­ groms reflected the surge of violence in towns at this time resulting primarily from Russia's modernization and industrialization. Recent scholarship concerning the pogroms during 1903-6 also minimizes the conventional emphasis on government conspiracy and complicity (Lambroza, "Pogrom Movement"). 34 TsentraTnyi statisticheskii komitet Ministerstva vnutrennikh del, Pervaia vscobshcbaia perefts' naselenita, 13:3; Salo W. Baron, The Russian Jew under Tsars and Sovtets (New York, 1964), p. 68.

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The storm of anti-Semitic violence that swept across the Ukraine follow­ ing the assassination of Alexander II on March 1, 1881 was the greatest expression of popular violence to hit Russia since the Pugachev rebellion in the late eighteenth century. Ekaterinoslav5S major pogrom took place relatively late in the storm, after most of the pogroms had already occurred. In 1881-82, Jewish lives and property were attacked in 259 towns and villages in southern Russia.35 The seriousness of these pogroms varied greatly. In the worst incidents, pogromists murdered, raped, and mutilated Jews of all ages and plundered and destroyed private and commercial prop­ erty on a mass scale. In Kiev, pogromists killed approximately forty Jews, with hundreds more wounded. Losses in Kiev equaled 2.5 million rubles. But most of the pogroms involved no more than the shattering of windowpanes in Jewish shops and homes and the stealing of liquor from Jewish taverns.36 Ekaterinoslav experienced one of the many small pogroms on May 1, 1881, when, according to the official government report, "the workmen employed on the railway attacked and pillaged several shops belonging to Jews."37 A major pogrom seemed imminent, but the city's large Jewish community managed to survive all the rumors and scares relatively un­ scathed. More serious disturbances may have been avoided at this time because the local authorities adopted an unusually strong antipogrom pos­ ture. The governor issued a proclamation, posted around the city, which declared Jews to be "subjects of the tsar" and entitled to the protection of their property. The seriousness of the government's position was rein­ forced by four companies of troops.38 Despite these government measures, the threat of a pogrom equal to those occurring elsewhere in the Ukraine remained great. Reuters reported on May 8, 1881 that "the terror of the Jews in Ekaterinoslav is so great that on Wednesday last the authorities forbade the use of the boulevard as a public promenade, and took other precautionary measures."39 Ekaterinoslav5S city duma unanimously adopted a proposal to start a campaign to educate city residents that attacks on Jews hurt not only the Jews, but the welfare and finances of the empire as well. The duma also urged the bishop of Ekaterinoslav to join in the efforts to preserve order by speaking out against the evil of attacking 35 The lives of those who lacked the wherewithal to recover were ruined. Almost one hun­ dred thousand Jews were impoverished and twenty thousand were left homeless as a result of all the pogroms (Shlomo Lambroza, "Jewish Responses to Pogroms in Late Imperial Russia," in Living with Antisemitism: Modern Jewish Responses, ed. Jehuda Reinharz [Hanover, 1987], p. 259). 36 Aronson, "Geographical and Socioeconomic Factors," p. 19; Baron, TheRussian Jew, p. 53; Jonathan Frankel, Prophecy and Politics: Socialism, Nationalism, and the Russian Jews, 18621917 (Cambridge, England, 1981), p. 52. 37 Jewish Chronicle, no. 634 (May 20, 1881): 13. 38 Jewish Chronicle, no. 668 (January 13,1882): 8 and no. 634 (May 20, 1881): 14. 39 Reprinted in Jewish Chrontcle, no. 633 (May 13, 1881): 8.

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Jews.40 But this unusual level of antipogrom activity by the local authori­ ties ultimately failed to save EkaterinoslaVs Jews from the workers and others in the city itching for a full-blown pogrom. "A single spark can start a prairie fire," in the words of Mao Zedong. EkaterinoslaVs 1883 pogrom, one of the worst of the nineteenth century, was set in motion on July 20 by nothing more than the cries of a peasant woman at the market. A petty incident could trigger a massive pogrom partly because July 20 was the Russian Orthodox holiday of St. Elias (Eli­ jah).41 On holidays the city filled with workers and peasants who had come to shop and drink. The woman had run out of a Jewish shop howling as if in pain after the salesclerk smacked her son when he tried to steal the store's scale.42 The woman's cries drew a large crowd consisting primarily of two hundred "laborers." The crowd eagerly took vengeance on the shop. They beat the clerk so badly he died the following day; then they plundered the shop and destroyed anything too large to carry off.43 This violence and plunder proved to be just the beginning. The rioters shouted "Beat the yids!" and proceeded to sack neighboring shops and a liquor store. After quickly drinking their fill, the crowd moved on to the quarter where most of Ekaterinosla^s Jewish businesses and artisanal workshops were located. By then the crowd had swelled tremendously, as approximately three thousand railroad workers joined in the rampage. Groups of one hundred and more, armed with crowbars and hammers, stormed Jewish shops and residences. The city market, the synagogue, and prayer houses suffered enormous damage. To capitalize on the pogrom, townspeople and peasants, many of them women, followed behind the rampaging workers carrying sacks and boxes, into which they stuffed as many Jewish belongings as they could.44 No police were to be seen when the pogrom erupted because it was before 9 a.m., the hour the police went on duty. By the time the police arrived, they were badly overmatched. They did try to stop the pogrom, however. In contrast to their reported performance during pogroms in other southern cities, Ekaterinoslav5S police persistently tried to pacify and disperse the rioters. But, unwilling to shoot pogromists, they could do little except arrest isolated rioters.45 40 Ibid.,

no. 646 (August 12, 1881): 6. Dubnov, History of the Jews, translated and revised by Moshe Spiegel (New York, 1973), 4:547. 42 Workers and peasants commonly distrusted the accuracy of Jewish shopkeepers' weights and measures. 43 Jewish Chronicle, no. 752 (August 24, 1883): 6. 44 Jewish Chronicle, no. 751 (August 17, 1883): 6 and no. 752 (August 24, 1883): 6; Novopolin, "Iz istorii rabochego dvizheniia," p. 19. 45 An attempt to disperse the pogromists by attacking them with the fire-brigade hose back­ fired. July 20 was so hot that while the hoses' powerful spray temporarily forced pogromists 41 Simon

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Troops offered the only realistic hope to suppress the rioting mob quickly.46 But few troops were immediately available July 20 to stop the pogrom, even though a garrison was located in Ekaterinoslav. The pogromists were probably aware that most of the army had left for its summer encampment. Of those soldiers left behind, a large number had gone to work in the fields outside town and therefore were not available to sup­ press the sudden outburst of rioting. The first troops to appear concen­ trated on Ekaterininskii Prospekt, the city's principal boulevard; they man­ aged to protect the Jewish businesses there. When reinforcements from surrounding localities finally arrived, the troops descended on the largest concentration of pogromists. The command to fire was given and the troops fired a volley of blanks. Unintimidated, workers jeered at the sol­ diers and continued to riot, convinced the soldiers would never kill fellow Russians to protect Jews. The troops proved the pogromists wrong when they fired again, this time with live ammunition. Although most of the troops fired over the heads of the crowd, more than a few pogromists were hit. Even the sight of fallen bodies failed to disperse the rioters immedi­ ately. The incensed crowd heaved a shower of rocks toward the troops, hitting forty privates, four officers, and several policemen. The troops fired again. This second volley finally dispersed the crowd, but the rioting con­ tinued elsewhere in the city; and later that night the soldiers fired again at pogromists.47 The Jewish community in Ekaterinoslav, until then one of the wealthiest in southern Russia, was devastated by the pogrom. The pogromists had plundered and demolished 846 residences. Nearly 2,000 Jewish families were impoverished, and total damage was estimated at between 600,000 and 1 million rubles. Their loss was more monetary than physical, as EkaterinoslaV^s Jews generally managed to escape personal assaults by fleeing the city once the pogrom began. Women were raped and Jewish blood was shed; but other than the shop clerk, it was pogromists who died during the pogrom. The soldiers killed twenty-eight rioters and seriously wounded many more.48 The threat of renewed pogromist outbreaks followed the July pogrom. On at least two occasions later in the year, another major pogrom might to retreat, the cold shower also seemed to invigorate the drunken rioters. They simply moved their attacks on Jewish homes and businesses to a neighboring street. 46 Whether the military would actually act to quell the disorders was another question. In many instances, once pogroms got under way, troops and Cossacks were less inclined to attack pogromists than acts of Jewish resistance, since they did not want to be viewed as attacking Russians to protect Jews. 47 Jewish Chronicle, no. 752 (August 24, 1883): 6. 48 Ibid.; Jewish Chronicle, no. 753 (August 31, 1883): 10-11. Of the 327 people arrested for their participation in the pogrom, 153 were soon freed. Of the 107 arraigned, only 67 stood trial.

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have erupted in Ekaterinoslav if the local government and Cossacks had not taken immediate preemptive action. As it was, the rioters succeeded only in wrecking a shop or two before these pogroms were stopped.49 Ekaterinoslav^s 1883 pogrom revealed that workers were prone to en­ gage in pogromist actions as well as strikes and attacks on their company's property and personnel. In the 1890s, Donbass-Dnepr Bend workers re­ peatedly engaged in violent rioting that had a pogromist component as one of its central features. In later years, these outbursts of pogromist rioting were more closely connected to traditional forms of labor violence than was the pogrom of 1883. Unlike the pogromist wave of the early 1880s, pogromist activities in the 1890s occurred as offshoots of factory distur­ bances. During the rest of the 1880s, with the exception of the miners' uprising in Rutchenko in 1887, the Donbass-Dnepr Bend labor movement continued to consist primarily of isolated work stoppages that attracted little national attention. After a decade of general labor quiet, Donbass-Dnepr Bend workers' discontent exploded violendy in August 1892. Angry workers in Iuzovka and the surrounding area went on a destructive two-day rampage. The government dubbed this riot the "cholera bunf because it was sparked by the cholera epidemic that afflicted Donbass-Dnepr Bend miners in con­ junction with the 1891-92 famine and by rumors of cholera-related dis­ turbances along the Volga River. The bloodiest industrial conflict in Rus­ sia in the 1890s, the Iuzovka riot created a sensation not only in the Donbass-Dnepr Bend, but throughout the country. Iuzovka's working-class population was primed to explode just weeks after the cholera epidemic claimed its first victim in the area. The govern­ ment had implemented a number of preventive measures that angered workers.50 A minor, seemingly insignificant confrontation on Sunday, Au­ gust 2 touched off the riot. A group of workers, probably drunk—it was midafternoon on Sunday—refused to allow the authorities to take the cholera-infected wife of one of the workers to the dreaded cholera barracks (where they had good reason to believe she would die, far from her family). When a member of the cholera commission charged with hospitalizing the woman returned to the victim's working-class slum accompanied by the police inspector, workers greeted their arrival with an onslaught of jeers and rocks. "Complaints were shouted about 'Jew doctors' who had sup­ posedly come from Rostov and were 'poisoning our brothers,' and the of­ ficials were asked why only Russians died, while the English and Jews did not even fall ill."51 The workers' resistance forced the authorities to retreat. 49 Jewish Chronicle,

no. 763 (November 16, 1883): 7 and no. 752 (August 24, 1884): 7. chapter 3; and Potolov, Rabochic Donbasw, pp. 211-212. 51 Russkie vedomostt, no. 326 (November 25, 1892): 4, quoted in Friedgut, "Labor Vio50 See

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The combination of workers' anti-Semitism, recent death tolls, and fear of doctors ignited long-standing grievances. As nightfall approached, the neighborhood became increasingly agitated. A crowd of workers began to make their way toward the cholera barracks, which they clearly intended to destroy, when they stopped at the district marketplace, "Novyi svet" (New World). Police confronted the crowd but, feeling overwhelmed, failed to take any action to disperse them. The workers lost sight of their original target and began to sack Jewish shops and taverns. Flames soon engulfed parts of the marketplace. On this first day of rioting, the rampag­ ing crowd attacked only Jewish shops. They left unscathed shops whose owners, by displaying an icon, could indicate they were not Jewish.52 Some skilled workers did make a futile effort to stop the pogrom.53 Even Cossack bullets failed to stop the rioting workers. A Cossack squadron had been permanently garrisoned in Iuzovka after a wave of strikes in 1888.54 Therefore, only a short time elapsed between the begin­ ning of the rioting at the marketplace and the arrival of the Cossack squad­ ron; but by then the number of workers and other local residents flowing into the market to join the riot already approached five thousand. This crowd greeted the Cossacks' arrival with a shower of rocks. Threatened and enraged, the Cossacks wasted no time in abandoning the whip for the rifle and firing a volley into the crowd. The crowd did not disperse until shots rang out again, spilling more blood.55 The Cossacks killed between fifty and two hundred workers, with the wounded probably numbering many times that. At least twenty-five officers and soldiers suffered wounds.56 It was the worst civilian massacre until Bloody Sunday. The disturbance did not end with the Cossack attack. The rioters contin­ ued to give vent to their fury the next day, August 3. That morning, work­ ers at the Iuzovka steel factory continuously sounded the factory whistle, which could be heard for miles. Miners from the eleven large mines nearby heeded the call and arrived to join the factory workers. The number of participants in that day's disturbances was estimated to be at least fifteen thousand. The size of the crowd may even have reached thirty thousand.57 lencc," p. 255. Cholera victims in Russia typically came almost entirely from the lower classcs (Frieden, Russian Physiaans, p. 144). 52 TsGIA, f. 1405, op. 93, cd. khr. 8555, p. 42, cited in Friedgut, Iuzovka and Revolution, 1:201. 53 Kharcchko, "Sotsial-dcmokraticheskii soiuz," p. 10. 54 John Bushnell, Mutiny amid Repression: Russum Soldiers in the Revolution of1905-1906 (Bloomington, Ind., 1985), p. 27. 551 TsGIA, f. 1405, op. 93, d. 8555, p. 125. 54 Rabochce dvizbenie ν Rossii νXIX veke, vol. 3, pt. 2:211; TsGIA, f. 1405, op. 93, d. 8555, pp. 43, 50; Potolox, Rabocbie Donbassa, pp. 212-213; Bushnell, Mutiny amid Repression, p. 27. 57 Levus, "Iz istorii," p. 51.

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The disorder engulfed the entire Iuzovka district. For all practical pur­ poses, Iuzovka briefly found itself at the mercy of rioting miners and un­ skilled factory workers. They destroyed other parts of the city besides Novyi svet—primarily shops and taverns in and around the Larinskii mar­ ketplace. The Cossacks did not fire into the crowd again, apparently con­ tent to disperse groups of rioters periodically and to protect the police sta­ tion and some church, postal, and administrative buildings while they awaited the arrival of reinforcements.58 The disorders stopped almost as suddenly as they had started. In the afternoon of the second day, workers began drifting home, and the distur­ bances had almost completely ceased when the Ekaterinoslav vice-governor arrived with two infantry battalions. Three more squadrons of Cos­ sacks arrived the next day, August 4. By the time the riots finally ended, the rampaging workers had looted and ravaged 180 stores, 12 taverns, 7 residential buildings, and a syna­ gogue, wreaking approximately 1.5 million rubles' worth of damage.59 Over five hundred workers and members of their families were arrested. On August 8, EkaterinoslaVs governor, V. K. Shlippe, arrived in Iuzovka. Implementing the directive sent by Alexander ΠΙ, the governor ordered the public flogging of 190 people, including 14 women.60 Among the sixty-six workers convicted in court, four were singled out and sentenced to death for instigating and leading the riot. Their sentences were later commuted to life imprisonment.61 Although it was common for death sentences to be commuted, the rea­ son in this case may have been that even the authorities recognized that a handful of ringleaders could not be held responsible for such mass fury. In his report to the minister of internal affairs, the governor himself attributed the riot to Donbass-Dnepr Bend working and living conditions. 'The miners' quarters are in dank, crowded dugouts. They meet solely with their fellows, with benighted folk, and this only on their free day and in the tavern. In such circumstances the mine workers have no opportunity to hear wise counsel of an honorable nature. They are surrounded by every­ thing that leads to degradation and there is nothing to refine their cus­ toms."62 Following the riot, Donbass-Dnepr Bend workers' living condi­ tions attracted the attention of privileged society, as well as the government's concern, which led to the formation of a special commission Vtoroi s"ezd RSDRP: Protokoly, July-August 1903 (Moscow, 1959), p. 535. "Labor Violence," p. 417; Potolov, Rabochie Donbassa, p. 212. 60The 100-150 lashes were intended to inflict "serious physical pain" (Iu. Iu. Kondufor, ed.,IstoriiarabocbikhDonbassa [Kiev, 1981], 1:57). 61 Potolov, Rabocbie Donbassa, pp. 214-215. 62Rabocbee dvizhenie ν Rossii ν XDC veke, vol. 3, pt. 2:561, quoted in Friedgut, "Labor Violence," p. 255. 58

59 Brower,

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to investigate housing and living conditions in the region.63 The provincial commander of EkaterinoslaVs gendarmes, D. I. Boginskii, recognized that in addition to "discontent with decrees regarding cholera," it was infre­ quent pay, "the rising cost of necessities in the settlement [Iuzovka], actu­ ally higher than in the district capitals or even the provincial capital," and the "discontent of Russian workers with the foreign workers and foremen in the factories" that were responsible for triggering the massive riot. Bog­ inskii proceeded to predict that "such disorders will be repeated annually, to a greater or lesser degree . . . because the mine owners all without ex­ ception, and in particular the French companies, as well as the merchants, exploit the workers."64 Such long-term industrial conditions certainly con­ tributed to the disturbances, as did working-class anti-Semitism. Any seri­ ous search for the cause of the riot could not and did not stop with the cholera epidemic. The factory administration chose to take comfort from the fart that de­ mands addressing working and living conditions were never raised during the riot. The report presented at the annual conference of the Association of Southern Coal and Steel Producers tried to shift all responsibility for the disorders from industrialists onto phantom organizers. The industrialists' report argued that the riot was prepared beforehand by unknown instigators. . . . The workers are migrants . . . for the most part landless . . . and [the miners] are especially dissolute and undisciplined, easy to incite to engage in all sorts of riots; workers from most of the [nearby] mines participated in the Hughes factory disorders. The workers did not request an increase in wages or anything else from their bosses, but sim­ ply gave themselves up to theft and violence, encouraged and quite obviously led by experienced hands.65

To the industrialists, what was needed was more force.66 In refusing to accept any responsibility for the most destructive riot to erupt in the Russian empire since the pogroms of the early 1880s, the in­ dustrialists fooled no one, except perhaps themselves. The response of the ministry of internal affairs to the industrialists' assertion that the riot was 63 Vtoroi s"ezd RSDRP: Protokoly, p. 537. It was following the "cholera riot" that many mines began to build better housing. 64 Rabochee dvizhenie νRossii ν XJX veke, vol. 3, pt. 2:214. 65 Kolpenskii, "Kholernyi bunt1," p. 112. 66 The industrialists demanded that EkaterinosIavS governor provide increased protection. The government agreed to billet more troops in Donbass-Dnepr Bend industrial districts on the condition that the factories and mines assume the cost of building barracks and other military housing. Many enterprises, chiefly the smaller ones, balked and ultimately refused to contribute. As a result, additional troops still had not been stationed in the Donbass-Dnepr Bend when the century ended. j

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inspired by some guiding hand was "Where, then, is this hand?"67 But as was true of the other working-class riots that followed during the 1890s, the industrialists were not solely to blame. As the 1892 gendarme report correctly suggested, Donbass-Dnepr Bend labor unrest was a complex phenomenon. The explanation must be sought in the multiplicity of strains and injustices in Donbass-Dnepr Bend working-class life. In 1892, the cholera epidemic and the increase in the cost of food resulting from the 1891 famine only aggravated all the other strains the mass of predominandy young migrant workers experienced in Donbass-Dnepr Bend in­ dustrial centers. As in other working-class riots, the mixture of causes led to violent rampages in which workers vented their pent-up hostilities on a mixture of targets. The "cholera riot" foreshadowed the other major working-class riot in Russia during the 1890s. Some of the elements of the earlier unrest, par­ ticularly the cleavage between skilled and unskilled evident in the "cholera riot," came to the fore in the disturbance that erupted at Ekaterinoslav1S enormous Briansk mill in May 1898. The Briansk riot provides some final background to the politically more significant labor actions that followed in the twentieth century. The Briansk riot took place during the sharp upturn in labor unrest that occurred in the Donbass-Dnepr Bend between 1895 and 1899. It was the first instance in which Donbass-Dnepr Bend labor unrest can be linked to radical agitation. There is no evidence to support the authorities' tendency to blame outside agitators for previous strikes and riots. The first mass social-democratic agitation campaign in the DonbassDnepr Bend preceded the Briansk riot. For months, Social Democrats dis­ tributed leaflets that for the first time brought out into the open workers' just complaints and grievances.68 But as the Briansk riot demonstrated, the Social Democrats were not in a position to lead an outbreak of industrial unrest in the city. While the riot coincided with the origin of mass socialdemocratic agitation in the Donbass-Dnepr Bend and demonstrated that revolutionaries could play some role in inciting workers to act, the Briansk workers rejected the revolutionaries' calls for nonviolent demonstration of their discontent. The leaflets called for workers to present demands and peacefully walk off the job. The workers' response was to reaffirm their traditional preference for more violent expressions of discontent. The Briansk working-class riot proved to be even more spontaneous and vio­ lent than Iuzovka's "cholera riot." 67 Quoted

in Friedgut, "Labor Violence," p. 256.

EkaterinoSlav5S growing social-democratic movement managed to include more than one hundred workers in its circles in the years 1896-97 (see chapter 5). 68

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Following the formation in December 1897 of Ekaterinosla^s Soiuz bor'by za osvobozhdenie truda (Union of Struggle for the Emancipation of Labor), the city's Social Democrats concentrated their main efforts on a leaflet campaign. During the first few months of 1898, Ekaterinoslav^s So­ cial Democrats distributed leaflets among the city's workers on an unprec­ edented scale. On a simple hand press, they cranked out thousands of cop­ ies of eight different leaflets, which they distributed around the factories and working-class quarters. On a single night in February, Social Demo­ crats clandestinely distributed three thousand copies of a leaflet that at­ tacked conditions at the seven largest factories in Ekaterinoslav.69 Such a large-scale effort created a stir within the factories. "Some were explaining that there must have been many of'them' to give out so many leaflets in so many places in one night, and there were various conjectures about the power and strength of'these people,' their courage, and so on."70 The Soiuz bor'by leaflet campaign focused on workers' everyday con­ cerns. The social-democratic activists appreciated the political conserva­ tism of the mass of workers in Ekaterinoslav, who "en masse were distin­ guished by their devotion to the tsar."71 Not one political word appeared in the leaflets. Only the most skilled workers showed much interest in thinking about politics, and they were as likely to be drawn to the right as to the left, according to Georgii Petrovskii, who worked at the Briansk factory in the 1890s. Petrovskii noted that many of his fellow workers later did join the reactionary, virulently anti-Semitic Black Hundreds' Union of Russian People.72 The Soiuz bor'by's politically neutral leaflets appeared to be a great suc­ cess. For many Ekaterinoslav workers, the leaflets at last articulated griev­ ances that had long angered them. The demands were modest, as is clear from this summary of the demands in the leaflet distributed among the workers at the Kamensk, Gallershtein, and Esau factories and in the rail­ road machine shops (note that no mention is made of a wage increase): 1. That the factories permit workers, 'Svho work day and night in dust and smoke," to use the factory baths, which now are restricted to the foremen. 2. That the factory doctors be present during the posted hours and stop charging patients for medicine during home visits. 3. That the processing of accident claims be timely. 4. That an emergency hospital facility be constructed within the factory. As it Petrovskii, "S 1893 g. po 1905 g.," pp. 50-51. Babushkin, Recollections, p. 115. 711. B. Polonskii, "Iz zhizni partiinoi organizatsii (1898-1900 gg. ) " I s t o r i i a e k a t c r i n o s l a v skot, p. 139. 72 "S 1893 g. po 1905 g.," p. 51. 69 70

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is, maimed workers risk dying from the loss of blood that occurs during trans­ port to the hospital miles away. 5. That the exit gates be opened at supper and after work.73 6. That workers be guaranteed one twenty-four-hour period every week when they do not have to work. 7. That the factories observe the law and stop work at 2 P.M. on the eve of Sundays and holidays. 8. That wages be paid every other Saturday and in full. As it is, workers are forced to go into debt to shopkeepers, who use credit purchases to sell inferior goods at inflated prices. 9. That piece rates be clearly stipulated and paid according to piece-rate agreements.74

The leaflet did end on a militant note. The Soiuz boPby proclaimed: "Here is not just an adversarial relationship between capitalists and workers. The capitalists lack simple humanity. They treat workers like dogs. .. . The ad­ ministration enjoys all the comforts of life, while for their workers, they think a dog's life is good enough."75 Social Democrats working inside the Briansk mill reported that workers there were discussing the leaflets. These workers were especially impressed when management at a couple of the smaller factories, fearing a strike, quickly implemented some of the demands the leaflets presented.76 The workers, however, showed no interest in the Social Democrats' tactical ad­ vice. The worker-activist Ivan Babushkin recalled how workers refused to follow the radicals' call to strike peacefully and present demands to the factory administration. They instead expressed a desire to wreck the factory offices and to beat foremen and factory guards: It was strange to hear the rumors among the workers about a revolt, in complete contrast to the message given in the leaflets, which said clearly that a rising was undesirable and could bring nothing but harm to the workers. They had read something different in the leaflet and nothing could change their belief that a revolt had been ordered. Old methods of struggle die hard; the workers couldn't think of a strike unless it entailed the beating up of a foreman or the wrecking of the factory offices.77 73 For security reasons, workers were allowed to leave work every day only through a nar­ row opening in the gates. This funnel created a potentially dangerous mob scene as workers in the crowd crushed one another and knocked over those who gathered outside the gate. 74 Listok rabotnika, no. 9-10 (November 1898): 15-17. Workers complained that manage­ ment often told them they were working for a piece rate so they would work harder, but then paid workers only the regular day wage. 75 Ibid., p. 17. 76 Soiuz russkikh sotsial'demokratov, Rabochee dvizhente ν Ekaterinoslave (Geneva, 1900), p. 4. 77 Recollections, p. 108.

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Tensions were already high at the Briansk factory when the death of a worker, killed in a scuffle with a Circassian factory guard, triggered the riot. As in the 1883 pogrom and the 1892 riot in Iuzovka, a relatively minor confrontation unleashed the workers' pent-up hostilities. Animosity between workers and company guards had been festering for some time and was an important cause of the Briansk riot. Workers throughout the Donbass-Dnepr Bend hated the mountaineers from the Caucasus Mountains hired as guards by many factories and mines to con­ trol theft and general unruliness.78 The Briansk factory management hired eighty Circassian guards in 1896.79 From management's perspective, the Circassians made excellent guards. Learning from the government's ex­ ample in its use of Cossack troops, the factory administration correctly thought the Circassian guards would not identify with the ethnically dif­ ferent work force and if necessary would not refrain from shooting at a crowd of workers for fear of killing one of their compatriots.80 Workers thought Circassian guards performed their duties with unnec­ essary zeal, and a large group of Briansk workers made their enmity toward the Circassians well known to the management and to everyone else at the factory. The question of the guards' treatment of the workers notwith­ standing, prejudice largely explains the workers' antagonism toward the Circassians. The workers disparaged the Circassians as a backward lot who did not even speak Russian. Many workers simply could not tolerate hav­ ing these "inferior aliens ruling over us 'Russian people'."81 Workers com­ plained repeatedly to the Briansk administration about their hiring Circas­ sians 'Svhile Russians go hungry."82 The enmity Donbass-Dnepr Bend workers harbored toward the Circas­ sians was normally bridled by fear. Fights occasionally broke out between the Circassians and the workers, but generally the workers were intimi­ dated, afraid to stand up to the Circassians, whom they considered "wild savages." Nonetheless, the workers' animosity could explode following an instance of perceived Circassian brutality. This was evident even before the death of a worker at the hands of a Circassian guard sparked the 1898 riot Until the introduction of Circassians in the Donbass-Dnepr Bend in the 1890s, many of the large foreign firms had recruited guards from among the same pool of applicants that provided the mass of their unskilled labor. Faaory guards were poorly paid and were often said to be accomplices to theft rings. At the Briansk factory, guards on average earned only fifteen rubles a month in the 1890s, a wage well below what workers possessing the most elementary skills earned (this sum did not, however, include the supplementary income bribes no doubt provided). 79 Many of the guards were actually Ossetian Cossacks, but they were referred to as Circas­ sians. 80 Pridneprtmkit krat, January 29, 1900, p. 4; Istoriia ckaterinoslavskot, p. 113. 81 Prtdneprtmkii hrai, January 26, 1900, p. 3. 82 Novopolin, "Iz istorii rabochego dvizheniia," p. 20. 78

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in Ekaterinoslav. When another Circassian guard stabbed a young miner during a walkout in 1895 at the Gorlovka mines, one of the largest enter­ prises in the Donbass-Dnepr Bend, what had been a peaceful wage dispute quickly turned violent. Although the worker was not seriously wounded, word of the knifing enraged the miners. A crowd of five hundred miners went on a window-smashing spree. The rampage stopped before it did extensive damage only because the workers' anger dissipated when an at­ tempt to force their way into the mine (where they intended to destroy machinery) was thwarted by locked, steel-reinforced doors.83 A similar "strike" and clash with the guards occurred at the Briansk mill two years before the 1898 riot.84 The 1898 Briansk riot began on May 29 when a young worker em­ ployed at a nearby factory tore a board off the fence surrounding the Briansk factory, shortly after the factory whisde signaled the end of the work­ day. The worker, Nikita S. Kutilin, a migrant from Kursk province, was on his way home from work. While Soviet historical accounts have por­ trayed this theft as an act of desperation by a worker without other means of heating his hut, contemporary sources, including the revolutionary press, state that Kutilin pried the board loose to taunt a guard on duty nearby.85 Whatever his motivation, within seconds the guard and Kutilin were at each other's throats. After kicking and knocking the guard down, Kutilin was more than holding his own when another guard jumped into the melee. The fight immediately attracted a crowd of onlookers from among the workers and hangers-on who happened to be milling around nearby. But before they knew what happened, the worker Kutilin lay dead, the victim of a dagger jab to the gut. The sight of their slain fellow left sprawled on the ground drove the crowd wild with fury. They attacked and unmercifully beat the hated Cir­ cassian guards—first the two at hand, then those that came running to their defense. The guards managed to escape with their lives, but the workers continued to lash out at the immediate cause of their rage by setting fire to sentry boxes and destroying the guards' belongings. Far from satiated after this retaliation, the workers were intent on a full-scale riot. The flames and shouting acted as magnets, and the crowd quickly swelled to some two Istoriia^ornorabocbikb, p. 141; Lcvus, "Iz istorii," p. 53. A. Smirnov, "Vospominanie ο I s.-d. rabochem kruzhke Ekaterinoslava ν 1894 g.," IstoHia ekaterinoslavskm, p. 20. 85 This account of the ensuing events is based on the following sources: TsGIA, f. 23, op. 30, d. 47, pp. 7, 15, 149; Pridneprvvsbi krai, Jan. 26, 1900, p. 3; Rabochee delo, no. 1 (April 1, 1899); Istoriia ekaterinoslavskm, pp. 109-110; Novopolin, "Iz istorii rabochego dvizheniia," p. 20; G. Petrovskii, "Vospominaniia ο rabote na Brianskom zavode ν devianostykh godakh," Letopis1 revoliutsii, no. 2 (1923): 32-33; Babushkin, Recollections, p. 133; Knyshev, Zarevo nad Brianskoi, pp. 22-23. 83 Gcsscn,

84

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thousand rioters, according to conservative estimates. Most of this crowd knew nothing of the circumstances provoking the riot except that a Circas­ sian guard had killed a worker. Spurred on by a few leaders, the howling crowd turned its sights on the factory itself and rushed in through the nowunguarded gates. In a flash, part of the crowd surrounded the factory of­ fice. Emboldened by the cloak of nightfall, workers fetched a sledgeham­ mer, cracked open the safe, and threw five thousand rubles to the crowd. They poured kerosene and set the factory office afire; within minutes it was enveloped by flames. The sight of the factory office going up in smoke further excited the crowd; they looted the factory store and sacked the apartments of some of the white-collar employees, primarily those apart­ ments occupied by foreigners. Many of the rioters then tried to enter the factory proper and wreak the same havoc there, but they were prevented from doing so by workers on the night shift. Even so, within one hour the rampaging crowd had inflicted over 150,000 rubles' worth of damage on the factory. During all this time, few of the local police were anywhere to be seen. In the face of such a large crowd, so quickly amassed, the police force fell into complete disarray. When the police chief eventually arrived and moved in among the rioters in an attempt to use his presence and powers of persuasion to calm the crowd, one of the workers shouted out, 'Tour Honor, go away. Let us have our rampage! Let us have our fun!"86 Ac­ cording to a Social Democratic account, these words expressed the mood of these people, who "like deprived convicts wanted one day to rampage and burn as they pleased."87 When the chief persisted in his attempt to calm the workers, someone threw a rock that hit him smack on the head, to the delight of the crowd. The chief collapsed and had to be carried away. Meeting no resistance, the crowd moved on to Kaidaka, an adjacent working-class quarter, where it continued beating, looting, and burning. Initially, when the rampage was still confined to the Briansk grounds, the crowd vented its anger solely on factory representatives, symbols, and in­ stitutions the workers particularly hated. But as the disorders continued, they assumed a different character. After the first target in Kaidaka—a gov­ ernment liquor store—had been sacked and the vodka downed, someone shouted, "We have vodka. Now we need zakuski [appetizers]—let's go for the yids' stores!"88 As the crowd of workers, many of whom were armed with crowbars and assorted metal rods, approached a row of small shops, shouts were heard: "Attack! This is a yid's shop!"89 The now wildly drunk 86 Rossiiskaia sotsial-dcmokraticheskaia rabochaia partiia, Sud nad brianskimi rabochimi (Geneva, 1901), pp. 11-12. 87 Ibid. 88 PridneprovskU krai, January 31, 1900, p. 3. 89 Pridneprovskti krai, January 30,1900, p. 3.

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crowd—"fuddled and fuming with drink," in Babushkin's words—dis­ played selectivity in choosing which shops to sack and pillage.90 Next, they terrorized the Jews living near the Briansk factory, smashing and plunder­ ing a Jewish prayer house along with dozens of homes, shanties, and shops. One Russian resident of this district later testified that he happened to rec­ ognize one of the workers among a group of rioters destroying seemingly everything in sight. He implored the worker to stop. The worker told him not to worry. "We aren't touching Russians' property, only that which belongs to the yids."91 One day laborer testified that when he saw the crowd sacking Jewish shops, dragging out men, women, and children, he tried to dissuade them. In response, someone in the crowd quickly shouted, "He who defends yids is himself undoubtedly a yid." The wouldbe peacemaker escaped attack only by unbuttoning his jacket to show a cross.92 When troops finally arrived, they cordoned off the factory and parts of the city. Confronted by the troops, workers threw a few rocks; but skir­ mishes were brief and the crowd quickly dispersed—although it was not until the early hours of the morning that the last of the rioters dragged themselves home. By then, searches in the working-class neighborhoods had already begun. Police and soldiers arrested anyone with an unusual quantity of groceries, often as little as a pound of sugar or one-eighth of a pound of tea. Within twenty-four hours they arrested twelve hundred peo­ ple. Over five hundred of those arrested were immediately exiled to their native villages. For seventy-three of the accused, there was thought to be sufficient evidence to place them on trial. Thirty-four of these were left in prison until brought into court almost two years later. The authorities' response to the riot, however, was not limited to re­ pressive measures. The workers who escaped arrest and exile enjoyed such concessions as a reduction in Briansk factory work shifts to ten and a half hours, the introduction of accident insurance, and the use of former sol­ diers instead of Circassians as factory guards 93 Around seven thousand workers were employed at the Briansk factory at the time of the riot. Who was it that participated? In such disorders, participant identification is always difficult, but this working-class riot is Babushkin, Recollections, p. 134. Pridneprovskii krai, February 1, 1900, p. 3. 92 Pridneprovskii krai, January 31,1900, p. 3. Such an attempt to dissuade a crowd of work­ ers bent on a pogrom was not necessarily futile, especially if undertaken before the crowd began rampaging. A year later, following the arrest of some workers for leading a walkout, a crowd of agitated workers began to vent their anger by throwing rocks at some Jewish arti­ sans returning home from work. A "simple word from a conscious worker was sufficient to stop the uproar," according to one account (Novopolin, "Iz istorii rabochego dvizheniia," P- 24). 93 Parasun'ko, Polozhenie i bor'ba, p. 491. 90 91

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relatively well documented because the riot and subsequent trial attracted national attention. The evidence, which includes trial testimony, worker memoirs, police and government reports, and the radical and daily press, indicates that the skilled Briansk work force was not to any significant ex­ tent responsible for the destruction. Many skilled workers not only refused to join in the violence, but acted to restrict its scope. When the rioters were looting and burning the factory office buildings, and the overwhelmed fac­ tory guards and local police could exert no control over the crowd, the factory itself—the machinery and workshops—was protected by skilled workers, albeit halfheartedly. In his trial testimony, the engineer M. A. Kokh stated that without the "fortunate development" of workers' defense of the factory, the bunt would have escalated into "a horribly bloody catas­ trophe." Kokh, as manager of the rolling and puddling works, was in charge of almost one-third of the Briansk work force. In his testimony, he recounted what happened in his section of the factory: Into my shop rushed workers who urged my workers to stop work, burn the building, and slaughter the administration. One of the senior workers of my shop, a person with great authority among his comrades—the foreman obvi­ ously did not command such respect—took a crowbar and began to threaten the rabble-rousers, then turned to the workers of my shop and exhorted them not to listen to the buntovshchiki. The workers wavered before they all acquiesced. With­ out this bit of luck it would have been very bad.94

The sources repeatedly emphasize that the major role in the Briansk dis­ orders was played by drunken working-class youths.95 Witnesses from the Briansk factory management identified the participants as young "back­ ward workers," those who especially "loved to drink" and "yielded easily to any outside influence."96 All in all, the weight of the evidence on the riot indicates that the rioters and looters consisted primarily of young, un­ skilled Briansk workers who were joined in the rampaging crowd by large numbers of similar workers from neighboring factories, along with more than a few of the unemployed or irregularly employed workers and vaga­ bonds who habitually milled around the factories.97 Even Kutilin, the 94 Prtdneprovskti krai, January 26, 1900, p. 3. There are other reports of such displays of worker resistance (Babushkin, Recollections, p. 134; Prtdneprovskii krai, January 29, 1900, p. 3). 95 Pridneprovskit krai, January 30, 1900, p. 3. 96 Pridneprovskii krai, January 26, 1900, p. 3; January 29, 1900, p. 3; January 30, 1900, p. 3; January 31, 1900, p. 3. 97 TsGLA, f. 23, op. 30, d. 47, p. 7. In a similar (if less destructive) riot a few months later at the Providence factory in Mariupol', hundreds of chernorabochte upset over their winter wage "together with other people and some beggars" destroyed some factory property and numerous shops (Rabochee dvizhenie ν Rossii ν XDC veke, vol. 4, pt. 2 [gendarme report, No­ vember^ 1898]: 211-213).

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worker whose slaying triggered the riot, was not a Briansk worker. The report on the riot in the official government press went so far as to flatly state that the Briansk workers themselves did not take part in the destruc­ tion. No doubt the explanation for that statement is largely semantic, a matter of convention; the reporter probably considered the large number of day laborers and other unskilled workers employed at the Briansk fac­ tory to be chernorabocbie, not rabochie—that is, temporary, not full-time, regular Briansk employees.98 One of the workers on trial as a ringleader was said to have worked only occasionally in the factory, since his winnings from other workers at cards and pitch-and-toss meant he usually did not need factory wages." As in the case of the Iuzovka "cholera riot," opinions varied on the causes of the Briansk riot. One official report described the rampaging crowd as "out of control. It did not understand what it was doing."100 One witness to the disorders, when asked in court to identify those sitting in the dock, answered, "How can I recognize them now, Your Honor? Now they are so peaceful and meek, but then they all looked to me like giants, tripled in stature."101 These impressions of the Briansk riot reflected a pop­ ular belief that such worker disorders could be explained by mob psychol­ ogy and the ignorant workers' propensity for violent drunkenness. Most reports, however, official and nonofficial alike, did consider factory condi­ tions—such as recent fluctuations in the length of the working day, deduc­ tions from workers' earnings, and late issuance of pay—to be leading causes of the outburst. How, then, is the working-class attack on Jews in all these instances to be understood? Before the 1898 Briansk factory disorders, workers repeatedly made known their resentment of the neighboring Jewish population. DonbassDnepr Bend workers, particularly the less-skilled, were virulendy anti-Semitic. I. Polonskii, who was active in the years 1898-1900 in EkaterinoslaVs embryonic Social Democratic organization, wrote in his memoirs that the mass of Ekaterinoslav5S workers were "notable for spontaneous chauvinism, in particular their anti-Semitism."102 In the 1890s, however, liberals and radicals had reason to argue that workers' pogromist outbursts stemmed more from class conflict, or from a hostility toward exploiters rooted in workers' personal experience, than from an age-old prejudice. This was the rationale pursued by the counsel for the defense at the Briansk 98 TsGIA, f. 23, op. 30, d. 47 (Report from Ekaterinoslavskugubernsku vcdomosti, May 31, 1898), p. 15. 99 Pridneprovskii krai, January 31, 1900, p. 3. 100 TsGIA, f. 23, op. 30, d. 47 (Ekaterinoslav governor's annual report, 1898), p. 149. 101 Rossiiskaia sotsial-demokraticheskaia rabochaia partiia, Sud nad bnanskimi rabochimi, p. 12. 102 I. B. Polonskii, "Iz vospominanii partiinogo tipografa," Istonta ekaterinoslavskoi, p. 140.

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trial. F. Ν. Plevako, V. A. Maklakov, A. M. Aleksandrov, and Ν. K. Murav'ev, some of the most illustrious trial lawyers in Russia, were attracted by the case and helped defend the accused Briansk rioters.103 Workers claimed the Jewish shopkeepers cheated them. In rough working-class neighborhoods and settlements such as that bordering the Briansk factory, workers' interaction with Jews was essentially limited to their dealings with the local shopkeepers, who were almost all Jewish. The trial defense asserted that shady business practices, overpricing, and usury by the Jewish shopkeepers understandably provoked the workers' rage. The defense lawyers presented the pogromist rampage as an attempt by the powerless to right past wrongs, a line of argument similar to that usually favored by the government when it explained what caused pogroms. The Jewish victims were held to share responsibility with their working-class attackers: "Compare, gentlemen of the court, these two types of people, compare the moral makeup of some of those shopkeepers with those sit­ ting in front of you in the dock—and you will be able to agree with me that these people could exchange places freely. . . for between them is just the force of circumstance, the significance of which you will determine in your sentence."104 Thanks partly to the lawyers' portrayal of the Jewish shopkeepers, the seventy-three defendants all received light sentences. Not one of the guilty rioters was sentenced to more than two years, even though evidence for the argument of the defense was slim. Although shopkeepers in Russia, whatever their ethnic background, were commonly accused of overpricing and selling shoddy merchandise, Jewish store prices should not have been especially provocative. Prices in the factory stores, the Jews' competition, were higher, and workers had long complained of the poor quality of goods in factory stores.105 While there were repeated accusations that Jewish shopkeepers "exploited the working population by cheating when measuring weights," the main source of tension seems to have been the Jewish shopkeepers' practice of giving credit or loans at high interest, as well as buying whatever workers had to sell. Workers, particularly those who worked irregularly and were always short on cash,106 were able to buy basic necessities and items such 103 These liberal lawyers were renowned partly for their oratory in defense of revolution­ aries and rebellious workers and peasants. Lawyers could say in court—and have printed in the local legal press—what the censors otherwise would never permit to be published in tsarist Russia. The Briansk lawyers' speeches were considered sufficiently radical for the Social Dem­ ocrats to publish and disseminate them in the underground pamphlet Sud nad brianskimi rabochtmi. 104 This statement is from AlekSandroviS concluding remarks to the court (Istoriia ekatmnoslavskm, p. 130). 105 One factory store was also looted during the riot. 106 Xhese were the "dregs" (podonki) of the worker population, in the words of A. M Gor-

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as sugar, tea, and tobacco on credit at the factory store. They then often went to the Jewish stores and exchanged these items for cash at a rate, of course, far below what they had originally paid. Customarily, the purpose of these exchanges was to buy vodka. This trading of groceries for liquor increased the workers' debt. Later, when workers received their pay and saw the amount deducted for credit purchases, they were prone to blame "the greedy Jews," whom they identified with the merchants.107

The three instances of mass working-class unrest examined in this chapter highlight Donbass-Dnepr Bend workers' proclivity to riot. Contrary to the prevailing view of Russian labor historians, late-nineteenth-century la­ bor unrest often proved to be violent, at least in the Donbass—Dnepr Bend. A mix of causes—the strains produced by rapid industrialization, frontier social conditions, and ethnic animosity—were responsible for widespread discontent in the Donbass-Dnepr Bend. Mass drunkenness, brutal brawls, and the regularly exercised option of moving on, either to another job or to and from the countryside, did not serve as sufficient outlets for workers' frustrations. Workers' collective action, as elsewhere in Russia, most com­ monly took the form of relatively peaceful work stoppages. But from the beginning of the 1880s, Donbass-Dnepr Bend workers repeatedly ex­ pressed their discontent in mass destruction and violence. Riots usually began with workers attacking their factory or mine and the residences and persons of their superiors. As riots spread, workers attacked targets unconnected with the grievance that precipitated their collective action. In Ekaterinoslav in 1898, an attack on the factory guards sponta­ neously degenerated into a pogrom. In the case of pogroms, the promise of loot and violent excess, as well as ethnic animosity, accounts for the workers' motivation. In these mass rampages, a stratification of workers is evident where it is possible to identify participants. It was the young, unskilled elements from the working-class districts that were the main component in pogromist crowds. Drawn to the mines and mills by the opportunity to work for relatively high wages, the tens of thousands of young peasant males who largely composed the Donbass-Dnepr Bend working class proved to be poor recruits for the sort of nonviolent, organized activity favored by the iainov, the Briansk plant manager (from his trial testimony as reported in Pridneprovskii krai, January 29, 1900, p. 4). 107 Pridneprovskii krai, January 26,1900, pp. 3-4. Shopkeepers also were accused of paying workers for factory property slipped past guards and of supporting those who preyed on workers by knowingly cashing stolen paychecks for a price (Pridneprovskii krai, January 27, 1900, p. 3; January 29,1900, p. 4).

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revolutionary parties. When thev were provoked to express their discon­ tent, rioting held far more appeal than illegal work stoppages. They had no interest in sacrificing for a long-term goal such as political change. Imme­ diate problems loomed larger in their minds, so that when the mass of workers did peacefully walk off the job in the late nineteenth century, it was to achieve bread-and-butter improvements. The workers' main con­ cern was an increase in wages, followed by a reduction in working hours and an improvement in working and living conditions. The dramatic upsurge in labor unrest in the last years of the nineteenth century did provide some encouragement for radical activists. Strikes, even bv miners, increasingly followed the distribution of radical leaflets.108 But rather than emphasizing workers' growing combativeness, the memoirs Social Democrats published decades later, following the Bolshevik seizure of power, emphasize Donbass-Dnepr Bend workers' low political con­ sciousness during this period. A summation of the problems the DonbassDnepr Bend labor force posed for radical organizers is provided by P. Smidovich, who hid his privileged background, trained to be a factory electri­ cian, and went to work at the Briansk plant in 1898. Smidovich not only intended "to live their life, to experience their suffering, their joy," but hoped to be able to propagandize the work force from within.109 His aborted effort to galvanize the Briansk workers into organized, nonviolent action produced only frustration and this description of the workers: If the boss presses down too hard the workers riot, bum the office, and beat the director—but thev1 are not able to formulate their demands and stand up for themselves. . . . The workers themselves are still unable to create an organization. Their godforsaken, hard lives weigh on their personalities and prevent their de­ velopment. . . . The people do not live and are not able to live with a clear head in this situation. They block out consciousness of their heavy lot with tobacco and liquor. Thevr drink frightfully.110

That Donbass-Dnepr Bend workers en masse failed to demand funda­ mental social, economic, and political changes seems to underscore Lenin's thesis that the mass of workers, left to themselves, were incapable of be­ coming an organized, class-conscious, revolutionary force. In the Don­ bass-Dnepr Bend, as elsewhere in Russia (and Western Europe, for that matter), workers for the most part shunned politics and proved difficult to organize, though on occasion they were receptive to appeals to strike for improved wages and working conditions. Not just miners, but steelworkers too—such as those at the Briansk factory—voiced their opposition to 108 This was the ease, for example, in Octobcr 1898 at the New Russia Companv coal mines {Rabocitet dvtzbeme τRassa νXDi veke, vol. 4, pt. 2:207). 109 P. Smidovich, "Rabochie mass)',*' p. 162. 110 Ibid., pp. 164—165.

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anyone who held the tsar "responsible for the bad position of the workers, rather [than] the chtnovnikt [bureaucrats] and capitalists."111 Only a smat­ tering of the more skilled, longtime workers within the ranks of the Don­ bass-Dnepr Bend industrial work force were receptive to the growing rev­ olutionary movement's propaganda and agitation and opposed the rioting favored by the mass of workers. The efforts of radicals to cultivate political protest within the DonbassDnepr Bend, which will be examined in the next chapter, became fruitful only after the turn of the century and then primarily because of the radicalization of artisanal rather than industrial workers. An explicitly political movement willing to go into the streets first appeared in Ekaterinoslav in 1901 and 1902, when street demonstrations followed leaflet campaigns by the local Social Democrats. On December 15, 1901, in a demonstration similar to those that had occurred earlier that year in Moscow, St. Peters­ burg, Kharkov, Kazan, and Kishinev, a few hundred demonstrators, many wearing red jackets and red ties, defiandy ignored the governor's promise to suppress with force even the smallest demonstration and began march­ ing on the central boulevard of Ekaterinoslav, singing the "Marseillaise," waving a red banner, and shouting "Long live political freedom!" and "Down with the autocracy!" The crowd swelled as sympathetic bystanders added their support before Cossacks wielding bullwhips and sabers broke up the demonstration. In 1902 Ekaterinoslav witnessed smaller, but simi­ lar, demonstrations during February and on May Day.112 This progress toward the politicization of the Donbass-Dnepr Bend working class was achieved at that time largely because artisans in the re­ gion played a central role in the emergence of a mass labor movement, just as they had earlier in Western Europe. In contrast to the predominandy Great Russian industrial workers and miners, a great number of the mosdy Jewish artisans—suffering doubly because of factory competition on the one hand and anti-Semitic governmental discrimination and popular hos­ tility on the other—were ready to support revolutionaries shouting "Down with the autocracy!" It was artisans, along with students—not industrial workers—who accounted for the bulk of the crowd when Ekaterinoslav saw Ekaterininskii Prospekt fill with demonstrators in 1901 and 1902.113 Lane, Roots, p. 165. F. I. Dan, Iz istorii rabochejjo dptzheniia i sotsud-demokrani ν Rossit, 1900-1904gg. (Ros­ tov-on-Don, n.d.), p. 20; D. Kol'tsov, "Rabochie ν 1890-1904 gg·," in Martov, Maslov, and Potresov, Obshchestvennoe dvizhente, 206; "Studencheskie volneniia ν 1901-1902 gg.," Krasnyt arkhiv, no. 89-90 (1938): 269; E. Adamovich, "Vospominaniia starogo bol'shevika," Istonia ekaterinoslavskot, p. 228; Iskra, no. 14 (January 1, 1902): 1 and no. 15 (January 15, 1902): 1. 113 The demonstrators demanded constitutional freedoms, but what in particular motivated student radicals to organize the 1901 demonstration was the beating of demonstrators in 111

112

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The Jewish artisans maintained the continuity of the Social Democratic influence in Ekaterinoslav during the first years of the new century, when it was especially tenuous among the Great Russian steelworkers and rail­ road workers. Skilled workers active in the revolutionary movement did participate in the 1901 and 1902 demonstrations, but they were a distinct minority and stayed in the background. Not one industrial worker was among the fifty arrested in the 1901 demonstration.114 While it is true that industrial workers' quiescence throughout the Donbass-Dnepr Bend dur­ ing the first years of the twentieth century could be attributed to the dra­ matic downturn in the mining and metallurgical industries between 1901 and 1903,115 since workers generally prove much less willing to take action when the job market tightens, more important were the still-powerful hold on workers of the myth of the "good tsar" and their animosity toward Jews and students. Some of the skilled workers were becoming increasingly re­ sponsive to the growing revolutionary propaganda and agitation in the Donbass-Dnepr Bend. But even with their growing strength in the ranks of the skilled, revolutionaries were in no position to direct mass labor un­ rest. As the next chapter shows, the revolutionary movement's penchant for centralization and hierarchical forms of organization, which excluded workers, also helps to explain its continued failure to capitalize on the dis­ content of Donbass-Dnepr Bend industrial workers and miners. Khar'kov on December 2 and the 1899 "provisional regulations" of universities, which made assignment to army disciplinary battalions the penalty for student insubordination. 114 Dan, Iz istorii rabocbego dvizhcniia, p. 20. 115 Between 1901 and 1903, Russian industry went into a tailspin. The Donbass-Dnepr Bend labor force suffered mass layoffs and pay cuts as industrialists reduced their work force and payroll by about 25 percent. They also reduced workweeks and significandy lowered pay scales, often by 25 percent (Vtoroi s"ezdRSDKP: Protokoly, p. 544). Most of the workers fired during the industrial depression left the Donbass-Dnepr Bend.

1. The central avenue of Makeevka. Note the proximity of the French-owned Makeevka Company's steel mill and coal mines to the town center.

2. The New Russia Company's steel mill in luzovka. In the foreground is the model company housing available to some skilled workers with families.

4. A "sled man" hauling coal in a mine.

5. Loading coal by hand into railroad wagons at the Gorsko-Ivanovskii mine.

6. Unloading coal for the blast furnaces at the New Russia Company5S steel mill.

7. Briansk rolling mill workers and management.

8. A crew of pattern-makers posing with shop foremen and managers at the Briansk steel mill.

A. Smirnov

I. Mazanov

Afanasev

G. Metlitskii

9. Ekaterinoslav -worker-intelligents active in Briansk steel mill Social Democratic kruzhki during the 1890s.

10. A reunion in the early 1920s of former workers who had been Bolshevik members of the Ekaterinoslav Social Democratic party. Left to right·. I. Zakharenko, I. Merenkov, I. Shevchenko, G. Petrovskii.

I "

.

11. Victims of 1905 pogroms in Ekaterinoslav. Postcards published by the selfdefense organization of the Labor Zionist party. From the Archives of the YTVO Institute for Jewish Research.

5 The Rise of Political Radicalism The worker who, despite all the danger, comes to our circles is above all a warrior... and our task is to release the powers and talents of that warrior, to place the sharply honed weapon of revolutionary socialism into his hands and teach him to use it.

(Iskra)

THE STRAINS of rapid industrialization in the Donbass-Dnepr Bend proved insufficient to generate a mass outbreak of explicitly political working-class action. Workers' lack of education and general "backwardness," their faith in the tsar, and the determination of some workers to make the transition from skilled worker to foreman (or, in the case of artisans, from employee to employer) were all daunting obstacles for the revolutionary movement. An additional disincentive was that any involvement in under­ ground political activity was forbidden by the government and harshly punished. All the same, radical activism did grow throughout the last de­ cades of the century. Through study circles, or kruzhki, Donbass-Dnepr Bend activists enjoyed some success in their persistent efforts to radicalize workers and encourage them to act collectively. Activists worked hard to establish alliances across ethnic and regional lines, alliances based on com­ mon class interests. Many individual skilled workers and artisans re­ sponded to the revolutionary message and entered the radical under­ ground. But the Donbass-Dnepr Bend revolutionary movement in the late nineteenth century failed to develop a strong base within the working class, or even a large number of factory contacts. It is not surprising, therefore, that the early history of the revolutionary movement was fitful and fraught with internal tensions, often between working-class recruits and their intelligenty leaders. Police sweeps repeatedly erased much progress. The early decades of radical activity finally bore fruit between 1903 and 1905, following the emergence of revolutionary political parties around the turn of the twentieth century. Donbass-Dnepr Bend workers appeared to appreciate the need for organization and leadership and supported the revolutionaries' calls for general strikes en masse. During the 1905 Revo-

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lution, the Donbass-Dnepr Bend revolutionary movement, although fac­ tion-ridden and troubled by class tensions, emerged as a powerful force. The transition to revolutionary activism was not as smooth as mass sup­ port for general strikes suggests. Although Donbass-Dnepr Bend workers felt exploited and responded to those promising that collective actions would alleviate their plight, they viewed with suspicion abstract notions of class solidarity and any emphasis on political rather than immediate eco­ nomic change, especially when expounded by Jews and intelligenty. Even during the revolutionary year of 1905, working-class political radicalism coexisted with a deep reactionary strain. As we will see later, the mass of workers remained an extremely volatile group. It was not a matter of chance that Ekaterinoslav was the one DonbassDnepr Bend city to join Russia's first general-strike wave, which swept across southern Russia in 1903. Ekaterinoslav had always been the center of revolutionary activity in the Donbass-Dnepr Bend. During the years leading up to the 1905 Revolution, Ekaterinoslav became a hotbed of rad­ ical underground activity—not just in comparison with cities in the Don­ bass-Dnepr Bend, but with cities throughout Russia. By the beginning of 1905, all of the three major revolutionary parties or movements—the So­ cial Democrats, the Socialist Revolutionaries, and the Anarchists—enjoyed as strong a base in Ekaterinoslav as anywhere in the country. The revolutionaries' numerical strength in Ekaterinoslav, however, meant nothing until they could elicit mass support from workers for gen­ eral strikes, which would provide the revolutionary movement with its power. As one of Ekaterinoslav5S Social Democrats recalled in 1905: For a long time, a very long time, we were forced to struggle in the darkness of political oppression. Under the threat of prison and exile, we withdrew into tight study circles, observing stria secrecy. Every step we took was done conspiratorially; all our work was conducted underground. From this underground our message had difficulty reaching the wide mass of workers, enormous difficulty. We suffered many arrests and succeeded in filling our ranks only with lone indi­ viduals from the ranks of conscious workers. The masses remained on the side, and only a grain of our teaching reached them. . . . Under the leaden lid of the autocratic order, as in the grave, all living forces in the country slumbered, and only the muffled voice of the revolutionaries from the underground disturbed the general quiet. This voice did trouble the reactionary forces, though, which felt that here was a growing enemy and which met each of our steps with furious blows. Victim after victim fell, but the SDs did not surrender and stubbornly carried out their underground work in anticipation of better days.1 1

Sotsial'demokrtu, no. 12 (August 18, 1905): 10.

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Radical activities in the Donbass-Dnepr Bend began during the Populist era. In the 1870s and 1880s, as throughout Russia, the small number of locally active radicals shared a Populist orientation and concentrated their efforts on the peasantry rather than the working class. But while peasants were the Populists' primary target, many organizers continued their prop­ aganda work after the harvest in places such as Iuzovka, where they tried to make contact with the workers employed in the recently opened steel mill and surrounding mines.2 Discouraged by their reception in the coun­ tryside, many Populists thought Donbass-Dnepr Bend workers' continual movement back and forth between agriculture and industry meant that they could serve as a conduit for bringing the Populist message into the village. Propaganda activity in the Donbass-Dnepr Bend was sporadic and its impact minimal during the 1870s and early 1880s. Populist ranks, small to start with, suffered wholesale arrests during the "Going to the People" movement and then were further depleted by the disillusionment follow­ ing that failure. Worker circles did appear in Ekaterinoslav and Iuzovka, but the primary centers of Populist propaganda in southern Russia were located just outside the Donbass-Dnepr Bend, in Khar'kov and Rostovon-Don. Khar'kov and Rostov did provide some cross-fertilization, as stu­ dents and workers introduced to radical ideas there occasionally traveled to the Donbass-Dnepr Bend. One such activist was a worker with the pseudonym of Leon Andreev, who left Rostov in 1876 to work at the Posokhov mine. Andreev immediately organized a kruzhok consisting of a handful of the Posokhov workers. Such rare contact usually proved short­ lived. It took the police just five days to learn of the kruzhok's evening meetings and Andreev5S message to the miners: "There is no God. . . . cap­ ital and government bureaucrats oppress workers and prevent them from enjoying a better life. Everyone should be equal so there would be no rich men or bosses."3 Occasionally a Populist organizer, if he did not overextend his stay, went undetected and achieved an extraordinary rapport with workers. Nikolai Bykovtsev, for example, went to work in the Grushevsk mines in 1876. His account suggests how zemliachestvo, the solidarity among workers of one region, could serve to protect radical organizers. Bykovtsev found in his short stay at the Grushevsk mines that workers would tolerate a radical in their midst rather than betray a brother zemliak: Among the mass of workers, of whom most were passportless migrants from Tambov, it was unnecessary to be especially secretive or restrained, since every2 3

Potolov, Rabocbie Donbassa, p. 190. Byloe, no. 8 (1907): 104—106, quoted in Potolov, RabochieDonbassa, p. 109.

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one working in the mines knows very well that to live with wolves it is necessary to howl with wolves. In other words, those who did not like revolutionary con­ versations did not have to participate in them, but to violate the rules of the wandering brotherhood in one's devotion to the legal order meant to risk one's head.4

Such isolated, brief, and superficial contact by early Populist activists left no imprint on the Donbass-Dnepr Bend labor movement. There is no evidence linking Populist propaganda with Donbass-Dnepr Bend labor activity during the 1870s.5 In the early 1880s, Lugansk suddenly became a center of activity for Narodnaia Volia, "the People's Will," following the arrival of student ac­ tivists from Kharkov, Rostov, and Odessa and their success at recruiting workers into kruzhki in 1883. In 1884 Lugansk became one of the nation's main Narodnaia Volia printing centers and bomb factories. The exploits of the local narodovol'tsy also included armed robberies to raise money for the financially strapped and beleaguered movement after the assassination of Alexander Π. But near the end of 1884, the movement suffered a near-fatal blow. The arrest of members of Narodnaia Volia's central organization in St. Petersburg provided the police with the names and addresses of activ­ ists in Lugansk. During the next few years, the Lugansk movement just barely managed to survive.6 Then, on the night of April 14, 1887, the police seized most of the remaining members.7 The Populist movement in Ekaterinoslav also briefly achieved success during the 1880s. Ekaterinoslav5S Narodnaia Volia movement became in 1884 the best organized and most effective of all the narodovol'tsy groups in the empire; and during the following year, Narodnaia Volia established its national headquarters in this still-embryonic industrial city.8 The autoc­ racy's practice of exiling arrested narodovol'tsy to provincial centers in the south and southwest helps explain why the movement's remaining leaders chose Ekaterinoslav as the place to resurrect the party following the police's decimation of the central organization in 1884. Ekaterinosla^s time in the radical limelight proved short, however. In 1886 the police arrested the narodovol'tsy in Ekaterinoslav, just as they had earlier in St. Petersburg and Lugansk. Following the police sweeps in Ekaterinoslav and Lugansk, the Populist movement in the Donbass-Dnepr Bend exhibited occasional signs of life, but it never truly recovered until the rise of the Socialist RevR. Popov, Zapiski ZemlevoliKa (Moscow, 1933), pp. 157-158. Potolov, Kabocbie Donbassa, pp. 189-190. 6 TsGIA, f. 1405, op. 88, d. 9998, p. 58. 7 Potolov, Kabodne Donbassa, pp. 192-199. 8 Norman M. Naimark, Terrorists and SoctalDemocrats: TheRussumRevolutionatyMovement under Alexander HI (Cambridge, Mass., 1983), p. 98. 4 M.

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olutionary party in the first years of the next century.9 The few workers involved in Ekaterinoslav and Lugansk Populist circles during the 1880s exerted no appreciable influence on their fellow workers.10 Even though most of the few revolutionaries active in the DonbassDnepr Bend continued to be Populists, beginning in the late 1880s, radi­ cals in Ekaterinoslav—as elsewhere in Russia—began to identify them­ selves as Marxists and their cause as social democratic.11 The history of social democracy in the Donbass-Dnepr Bend dates back well before a Social Democratic party was formally organized in Russia in 1898. Social democracy received a boost during the early 1890s, when the rapid growth of the working class was coupled with further cause for disillusionment with the peasantry—namely, peasant passivity during the 1891 famine. The increasing number of strikes, plus workers' forceful response to the cholera epidemic in Iuzovka's 1892 "cholera bunt," stood in sharp contrast to peasant quiescence. While Donbass-Dnepr Bend radicals were appalled at the miners' and factory workers' rioting, anti-Semitism, and general lack of "consciousness," their spirits nonetheless could not help but be bol­ stered by these outbursts and other signs of the workers' growing discon­ tent and penchant for mass action. With the industrialization of the region, Populism's emphasis on the peasantry seemed outmoded to most radical activists in the Donbass-Dnepr Bend eager to win mass support. As in the case of the Populist movement, it was radical intelligenty, typically from middle- and upper-class backgrounds—the proverbial outside agita­ tors—who first introduced Donbass-Dnepr Bend workers to social-dem­ ocratic ideas and encouraged them to abandon uncoordinated riots and work stoppages to engage in more "conscious" actions. They were outsid­ ers not just in the sense that they came from outside of the working class. Many of the first Marxist activists also arrived in the Donbass-Dnepr Bend from elsewhere in Russia. It is ironic, since the police and government authorities were so quick to blame these activists for worker discontent, that it was partly the government's own policy that sent many of these socalled outside agitators to the Donbass-Dnepr Bend. For all their success at penetrating revolutionary organizations with informers and wreaking havoc through mass arrests, the police in tsarist Russia also unintentionally helped spread social-democratic activities to cities such as Ekaterinoslav, just as it had earlier facilitated the spread of Populism. The government punished political offenders convicted of crimes not serious enough to 9 Novopolin, "Iz istorii rabochcgo dvizheniia," p. 21; Istoriia ekaterinoslavskot, p. xvi; Naimark, Terrorists, pp. 99-100; Dnepropetrovsku, p. 7. 10 Naimark, Terrorists, pp. 48,91-94. u A. N. Vinokurov, "Vospominaniia ο partiinoi rabote ν Ekaterinoslave," Proletarskaia revoliutsiia, no. 1 (1921): 165.

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warrant Siberian exile by banishing them to administrative exile within Eu­ ropean Russia. Subject to the authorities' approval, political convicts could choose any non-university town as their place of exile—including cities with a large working-class population and an active radical underground, such as Ekaterinoslav.12 Social Democratic activity in Ekaterinoslav began to flourish in the early 1890s, much as the Populist movement had during the 1880s. Social Democrats (SDs) in Ekaterinoslav were among the first to organize Marx­ ist study circles. These kruzhki differed little from the Populist circles they emulated. As an activist elsewhere later recalled, it seemed the logical way to proceed. The organizers of SD kruzhki thought that "gradually the number of workers studying Marx would increase, and that they would bring into their circles still more new members. With time, all of Russia would be covered with such study circles and we would form a socialist workers' party."13 SD organizers enjoyed more success in Ekaterinoslav than in larger industrial centers, such as Kharkov. By the mid-1890s, a handful of kruzhki existed in various places around the city. Despite the danger, selected students, artisans, and skilled workers from some of the city's factories chose to participate in the kruzhki organized by exiles.14 Even so, the movement's significance at this time should not be exagger­ ated. To provide some context in which to measure the Social Democratic view of success, when the "Briansk kruzhok" consisted of a dozen members in 1894, it was considered a great success even though there were five hun­ dred times that many workers employed at the Briansk mill who "did not even dream about political and social questions; among them 'darkness' reigned in the full sense of the word."15 In addition, almost half of the circle's participants actually were not Briansk workers, but local Jewish ar­ tisans or students and young professionals.16 In addition, the few factory 12 Rimlinger, "Management of Labor Protest," p. 232; I. B. Polonskii, "Iz zhizni partiinoi organizatsii (1898-1900 gg.),"Istoriia ekatertnoslavskot, pp. 131-132. As late as 1905, Russia still had only ten universities. None was located in the Donbass-Dnepr Bend. Radical stu­ dents from Kiev and Kharkov universities, as well as from EkaterinoSlav3S Higher Mining Institute, were active in the Donbass-Dnepr Bend. 13 S. I. Mitskevich, Revoliutsionnaia Moskva, 1888-1905 (Moscow, 1940), p. 143, quoted in W. Bruce Lincoln, In War's Dark Shadow: The Russians before the Great War (New York, 1983), p. 178. 14 Polevoi, Zarozhdenie marksizma, p. 487; Naimark, Terrorists, p. 210; R. Freidel', "Iz vospominanii ο 1-om rabochem s.-d. organizatsii ν Ekaterinoslave," Istorua ekaterinoslavskot, p. 7. 15 S. Belkin, "Vospominaniia briantsa ο pervoi s.-d. organizatsii ν Ekaterinoslave," Istoriia ekaterinoslavskot, p. 29. It is important to recognize, however, that kruzhki organizers focused more on recruiting individual workers with leadership qualities or potential than on recruit­ ing large numbers of workers (Weinberg, "Social Democracy," p. 6). 16 A. Smimov, "Vospominanie ο pervom kruzhke sots.-dem. rabochei partii g. Ekaterinoslava ν 1894 godu,"Letopis'revoltutsu, no. 2 (1923): 39.

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workers who became involved in the Social Democratic movement often did so without much forethought. I. Mazanov, one of the young skilled workers in the Briansk circle, later recalled, "A friend of mine, A. Smirnov, one day 'simply5 asked me if I wanted to read a banned booklet. Whether I read it then I don't recall, but the fact is that within a short time I already was in a kruzhok and had become a 'socialist.' I didn't understand at all the seriousness of the proposition. It simply tickled my vanity that I would be the kind of guy who knew socialists!"17 At least partly because circle leaders did not want to alienate their few working-class recruits, MazanoVs un­ derstanding of socialism remained superficial. After being arrested and thrown into prison, MazanoviS religious upbringing quickly reasserted it­ self. "On Sundays I went to the prison chapel, confessed my sins, and re­ ceived communion. The night before Easter I lit an icon candle and touchingly prayed 'on my knees' for the world of socialism. . . . Absurd, but thafs how it was."18 MazanoVs continued religious observance was not unusual, at least at this stage in the history of the Donbass-Dnepr Bend Social Democratic movement. The few workers the Social Democrats re­ cruited from the Briansk mill continued to celebrate religious holidays by attending church services, after which they caroused and got drunk.19 Many of the Social Democrats' followers had at most a rudimentary un­ derstanding of the ideology, but by 1895 the movement in Ekaterinoslav appeared to be making significant progress. The Social Democrats could boast that they had gathered over one hundred people in a forest outside the city to celebrate May Day with speeches and the singing of socialist songs.20 But the Social Democratic movement, like the Populist movement before it, proved to be vulnerable to arrests. The secret police used their own agents and workers they recruited to infiltrate the radical under­ ground. In 1895 the police rounded up most of the participants in EkaterinoslaVs Social Democratic movement. From 1895 until the 1905 Revo­ lution, police repression meant the fortunes of EkaterinoslaVs Social Democratic movement rose and fell dramatically. Each upsurge in the movement sooner or latej led to a wave of arrests. As a result, Social Dem­ ocratic activity in what had been a thriving center could slow to a crawl. The temporary lulls in revolutionary activity following mass arrests ex­ plain, at least partly, why to the small number of workers interested in I. Mazanov, "Pamiatka rabochego sotsialista," Istoriia ekatennoslavskoi, p. 22. Ibid., p. 23. 19 G. I. Petrovskii, "S 1893 g. po 1895 g.," Istariia ekatennoslavskoi, p. 49. Skilled, "con­ scious" workers in St. Petersburg, such as Semen Kanatchikov, also did not abandon religious habits until long after they began to share radical ideas (Reginald E. Zelnik, ed. and trans., A Radical Worker in Tsarist Russia: TheAutobwgraphy of Semen Ivanovich Kanatchikov [Stanford, 1986], p. 34). 20 Istorim ekaterinoslavskoi, p. xviii. 17 18

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Social Democratic propaganda the movement seemed unsystematic or ep­ isodic and why Social Democrats in the Donbass-Dnepr Bend never led a mass action during the 1890s.21 Some of the working-class recruits in Ekaterinoslav5S Social Democratic movement made the job of the political police easy by naively failing to keep their involvement in the radical underground secret. While many re­ cruits to kruzhki considered the risk of arrest great and were appropriately conspiratorial, other novice members dismissed the veterans' obsession with the need for precautions. One of the skilled steelworkers in the Briansk kruzhok recalled in his memoirs that he and his young friends scoffed at the warnings of their more experienced leaders and allowed the composition of the Social Democratic kruzhok to become widely known among the work force at the Briansk mill. Throwing all caution to the wind, they freely engaged in political discussions and often openly agitated at the factory. Smirnov recalled feeling proud, not compromised or wor­ ried, when workers he had never met before openly approached him at the factory with requests for radical literamre.22 Workers were more likely to fall into the clutches of the secret police than their intelligent leaders. In the 1895 police sweep, almost all the work­ ers in the Briansk kruzhki were arrested and exiled for three years to eastern Siberia, while most of the intelligenty managed to escape.23 The 1895 arrests created a sensation among EkaterinoslaVs workers. The response to the arrests reflects just how little workers still understood about the Social Democrats and their goals. According to one of the ar­ rested workers, news of the roundup left workers at the factory mystified: Workers had no idea why we had been arrested; to them we were just "good old boys." They asked in amazement, "How is it they got involved in such bad busi­ ness?" Some said that books were the cause of our arrest. Based on this, it was rumored that we had been taken away for falsifying the books in the factory payroll office. The comrades who escaped arrest were not able to explain the true cause of our arrest because of the danger of revealing their association with us.24

Indeed, those workers who had had some involvement in Social Demo­ cratic circles and escaped arrest were seized by a "terrible panic."25 Even so, within a few years Ekaterinoslav again became a center of Social Demo­ cratic worker activism. In fact, at various times during the second half of the 1890s, no other Russian city had a Social Democratic organization Wildman, Malting of a WorkerfRtmlution, p. 103. Istoriia ekatcrinoslavskoi, pp. 16, 22. 23 Ibid., pp. 16, 29. 24 Belkin, "Vospominaniia briantsa," p. 29. 25 Rabochee delo, no. 1 (April 1, 1899): 84.

21 22

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with as many working-class participants as Ekaterinoslav.26 When the Rus­ sian Social Democratic party held its founding First Congress in 1898, just five local organizations were represented. Ekaterinoslav was one of them. The rebirth of the Social Democratic movement in Ekaterinoslav follow­ ing the 1895 arrests can largely be attributed to the arrival from elsewhere of another wave of political exiles and activists. Many of the country's lead­ ing Social Democrats, including workers and artisans previously active in Social Democratic groups elsewhere, flowed into Ekaterinoslav and quickly put their experience to work.27 By 1898 the new arrivals more than filled the vacuum left by the 1895 arrests. Following the large textile strikes in St. Petersburg in 1896 and 1897, many of the capital's veteran Social Democrats arrived in Ekaterinoslav. One of the St. Petersburg exiles was the worker-revolutionary Ivan Babushkin, who soon headed a group con­ sisting primarily of factory workers. Before long, other exiles managed, through prison contacts, to locate Social Democrats in Ekaterinoslav who had escaped arrest. Isaak Lalaiants joined with two other political exiles, K. A. Petrusevich and M. Orlov, to form kruzhki and lead an organization that was known in Ekaterinoslav as the "intelligent group."28 Jewish activ­ ists from the northwest led a third group of Social Democrats in Ekateri­ noslav. These three groups all operated independendy of one another. Jews played a large role in the formation of Social Democratic groups in Ekaterinoslav and elsewhere in the Donbass-Dnepr Bend, as they did throughout the Pale of Settlement.29 Later, the Social Democratic com­ mittees at times consisted exclusively of Jews. That Jews were active in the revolutionary underground is hardly surprising, given the autocratic gov­ ernment's anti-Semitism and its discriminatory policies. Even within the Pale, those Jews who managed despite the quotas to acquire a higher sec­ ular education found it difficult to practice law, medicine, or other profes­ sions, and they were barred from academic and bureaucratic circles.30 Most of EkaterinoSlav5S leading Jewish activists initially came from the Pale's northwestern provinces, where Social Democracy enjoyed unparal­ leled success in the 1890s, particularly in Vilna and Minsk. Itching to ex­ pand their radical organizing to include industrial workers, increasing numbers of these Jewish activists "crossed over" after 1895 into the Don24 Potolov, Rabochie Donbassa, p. 219; Soiuz russkikh sotsial'demokratov, Rabochu dvizhenie ν Ekaterinoslave, pp. 2-3; B. Eidel'man, ed., "K istorii vozniknoveniia R.S.-D.R.P.," Proletarskaia revoliutstia, no. 1 (1921): 55; Istoriia ckaterinaslavskoi, pp. xx-xxi, xxv, 171. 17 Wildman, Making of a Workers'Revolution, p. 44. M Ibid., pp. 103-104. 29 Nairnark, Terrorists, pp. 187-188. 30 High-ranking authorities were not all so blind that they failed to see the political risks in their persecution of Jews. The anti-Semitic minister of internal affairs V. K. Plehve, for ex­ ample, unsuccessfully sought less-restrictive policies to improve Jewish conditions in "the interests of the state and of a sensible policy" (Rogger, Jewish Policies, p. 79).

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bass-Dnepr Bend and the Slavic movement because the "proletariat" in northwestern cities consisted almost entirely of Jewish artisans.31 Jewish activists commonly felt that without support from Russian workers, their dream of creating a mass movement to radically change the Russian em­ pire's political and social system would remain just that, a dream.32 To these Russified Jewish radicals, eager to enter the mainstream of the revo­ lutionary movement, Ekaterinoslav seemed especially attractive because it was one of the few industrial centers located within the Pale, where they did not need a special "right of residence."33 It is important to note that the Donbass-Dnepr Bend revolutionary movement had a thoroughly Great Russian character throughout the pe­ riod covered by this study, despite the Donbass-Dnepr Bend's location in the Ukraine and the considerable participation of Jews in the revolutionary movement. With few exceptions, leaflets distributed in the DonbassDnepr Bend were written in Russian, not Ukrainian or Yiddish. Social Democrats, as well as the intelligentsia generally, viewed Ukrainian as a crude peasant dialect of Russian. It was Russified Ukrainians, just as it was Russified Jews, who became active in the revolutionary movement. All the Social Democratic groups in Ekaterinoslav busily formed worker kruzhki. But despite the manifest need to educate workers drawn into the movement, dissatisfaction with kruzhkovshcbtna—study circles as the cen­ tral focus of the movement—was growing in Ekaterinoslav, as it was else­ where. Critics argued that the working-class recruits in kruzhki were usu­ ally artisans or the more skilled of the industrial workers, who commonly did not share the idealism and revolutionary fervor that motivated students and other intelligenty to form or enter radical study circles. Artisans espe­ cially entered radical kruzhki with the goal of personal betterment, rather than political activism. Leaders complained that the young Jewish artisans active in their kruzhki were interested less in becoming selfless revolution­ aries than in improving their Russian and gaining the schooling that would enable them to pass the high school equivalency exam, enter a university, 31 Istoriia ckaterinosUmkm, p. xx. Soaal Democrats referred to artisans, who in the Don­ bass-Dnepr Bend were primarily Jewish and worked and lived in the city center, as gorodshe, townsfolk. 32 Furthermore, such Jewish activists often wanted to leave the traditional Jewish life of the Pale behind. As one historian has explained, since they themselves had abandoned Yiddish and religious orthodoxy, it was natural for them to want "to participate in general political movements" (Mendelsohn, Class Strvgglt, p. 29). Some Jewish revolutionaries denounced Jewishness in the strongest terms. Lev Deutsch stated that to him and his fellow Jewish rev­ olutionaries, "everything that smeiled of Jewishness called forth among us a feeling of con­ tempt, if not more" (quoted in Henry J. Tobias, The Jewtsh Bund in Russia: From Its Origins to 1905 [Stanford, 1972], p. 18). 33 A. Vilenskii, "Iz vospominanii partiinogo tipografa ('Soiuz bor'by' i 'Rabochaia gazeta')," lstonm ekatcrtnaslarskot^ p. 78; Wildman, Making of a Workers' Revolution^ pp. 40—44.

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and leave their fellow artisans behind.34 Even so, artisans did figure among the Jewish Social Democrats arriving in Ekaterinoslav from the northwest in the second half of the 1890s—proof that circles often did achieve their goal of training worker-activists. In industrial districts, kruzhki leaders were often afraid to identify them­ selves as Social Democrats because of factory workers' conservatism and lack of schooling. Wary of their working-class recruits, many kruzhki lead­ ers waited to raise political and economic issues, and then did so quite carefully. Rather than discussing illegal literature and training socialist propagandists, the leaders of Ekaterinoslav5S early factory circles often spent their time providing workers with an introduction to such subjects as history, geography, or physics, because recruited factory workers, like artisans, often expressed an enthusiasm for learning and demanded an ed­ ucation.35 As one activist remembered, kruzhki leaders approached social and political issues "indirectly, by providing information about the situa­ tion of the working class in other countries, about the political system in Western Europe, so that a comparison with the system in our country un­ consciously rose in their minds."36 But as in the northwest, many of the artisanal and factory recruits tutored in Ekaterinoslav kruzhki later did play leading roles in Social Democratic activities. From the early years of the Social Democratic movement in Ekaterinoslav, once the artisanal and working-class members won the leaders' trust, kruzhki such as the one at the Briansk factory actively agitated workers. Intelligent members com­ posed leaflets in simple language urging workers to fight for their eco­ nomic interests; the kruzhki workers distributed the leaflets during the wee hours of the morning. They would make a complete sweep of the streets around the city's major factories and railroad workshop, leaving small piles of mimeographed leaflets where workers would see them when they tramped to work. Although most workers were still afraid to touch them (as of the mid-1890s, at least), Social Democratic leaflets were increasingly creating a stir among the mass of workers.37 With the aid of their workerrecruits' knowledge of workers' grievances, the intelligenty could list in their leaflets specific demands and elucidate the connection between their grievances and the tsarist political order. 34 Other Jewish intelligmty exhibited a "condescending, contemptuous attitude" toward the uneducated Jewish workers, whom they considered unworthy of "the teachings of social­ ism" (Mendelsohn, Class Struggle, pp. 45—46). 35 G. Novopolin, "Iz istorii ekaterinoslavskogo 'Soiuz soiuzov'," Putt rcvoliutsii, no. 4 (1926): 22. 36 Polonskii, "Iz zhizni," p. 140. 37 Istoriia ekatmnoslavskoi, pp. xxx, 6-7, 13-14; M. Zeikman, "Ekaterinoslavskii Soiuz bort>y za osvobozhdenie rabochego klassa, 1895-98 gg.," Letopts' revoliutsii, no. 6 (1924): 171.

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In 1897 organizational and tactical disputes hardened the splits in EkaterinoslaVs barely reborn Social Democratic movement. The infighting in Ekaterinoslav was hardly unusual. The radical Russian underground was notorious for disputes over seemingly minor issues. The initial dispute in Ekaterinoslav concerned the desire of the Jewish group from Vilna to transplant to Ekaterinoslav organizing techniques they had employed with success in the northwest. The Jewish activists from Vilna arrived in Ekaterinoslav determined "to recommend the adoption of more energetic tac­ tics—in the jargon of the day, 'to proceed from propaganda to agita­ tion.' "38 In the major northwestern cities, Social Democrats had organized proto-trade unions known as kassy among Jewish artisans. Organized by craft, the kassy were mutual-aid societies to which workers contributed dues of as much as 10 percent of their monthly incomes. The kassy main­ tained strike funds, provided financial support or loans to their members in the event of illness or accidents, and organized lectures, libraries, "Sat­ urday readings," and "evenings."39 Ekaterinoslav5S Vilna group organized some artisanal kassy, and it was not long before the kassy led a few small artisanal strikes. The dispute concerned both the need for secrecy and the role of artisans in the movement—the same issues that helped split the Russian Social Democratic party on the national level a few years later. The opposition to the Vilna group, led by I. Kh. Lalaiants and K. A. Petrusevich, argued that forming kassy along craft lines or introducing them in large enterprises could not be done conspiratorially and would inevitably lead to arrests. They also questioned the importance of organizing kassy among artisans— and even the importance of organizing artisans at all, since the Social Dem­ ocrats still had only minimal contacts inside EkaterinoslaVs factories. When the opponents of the Vilna group argued that the artisan movement should be secondary, they hit upon a touchy subject. This attack particu­ larly stung because the Vilna group itself thought that to organize, agitate, and propagandize in the factories ought to be the priority; after all, the reason these activists had left the northwest for the Donbass-Dnepr Bend was to expand their radical activities beyond artisans to industrial workers. But their aspirations aside, there was no denying that it was among arti­ sans, not industrial workers, that their efforts had enjoyed success in Ekaterinoslav. Of course, as even their critics conceded, there was also no de­ nying that in the mid-1890s Ekaterinoslav's Jewish artisans were much 38 J.

L. H. Keep, The Rise ofSocutl Democracy m Russia (Oxford, 1963), p. 45. Mendelsohn, "The Jewish Labor Movement in Czarist Russia, from Its Origins to 1905" (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1966), p. 96; Priimenko, Legal'nye organizatsii, p. 127. 39 Ezra

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more receptive to the radical message than the city's factory workers.40 The denigration of the role artisans could play in the movement proved to be the opening salvo in what would be a long and divisive battle in Ekaterinoslav's Social Democratic movement. The rebuked Vilna group re­ sponded by calling themselves the "workers' group," even though they had established few, if any, ties among factory workers.41 EkaterinoslaViS small but vigorous Social Democratic groups refused to cooperate with one another for months. Then, in December 1897, influ­ enced by the example of Social Democrats in St. Petersburg, they came together to form a local section of the Soiuz bor'by za osvobozhdenie truda (Union of Struggle for the Emancipation of Labor). The nonviolent work stoppages by almost the entire textile work force in St. Petersburg in 1896 and again in 1897 greatly bolstered Social Democratic spirits throughout the country. The solidarity achieved by the thirty thousand textile workers in the capital seemed to demonstrate that agitation could succeed. In Ekaterinoslav, as in other centers of Social Democratic activity, local leaders hoped that the St. Petersburg strikes indicated that the Russian labor movement was finally making the transition from stikhiinost3 (spontaneity) to soznanie (consciousness), from unorganized, often riotous outbursts of discontent to more disciplined, organized mass actions. Ekaterinoslav5S So­ cial Democrats thought that the city's workers might be ready to respond to agitation for such mass actions. The riot at the Briansk mill in 1898, following their largest leaflet campaign ever, disabused them of this no­ tion, at least temporarily. The top priority of the Ekaterinoslav Soiuz bor'by in the months after the Briansk riot became not agitating for mass strikes, but convincing workers of the damage to the labor movement that such a "wild outburst" caused. Social Democratic leaflets held up the non­ violent strikes in St. Petersburg and other Russian cities as an example that EkaterinoslaVs workers should emulate.42 Workers were discouraged from acting as they thought best. EkaterinoslaVs revolutionary movement sought not to ignite workers, but rather to channel discontent into nonvi­ olent, "conscious" actions. As a historian of the Jewish labor movement 40 Lalaiants, "O moikh vstrechakh," p. 60. In Odessa at this time, Social Democratic leaders were so afraid of scaring off or antagonizing Russian workers, or of giving the government reason for labeling the SD movement a "Jewish intrigue," that they prohibited activists from recruiting Jewish workers (Weinberg, "Social Democracy," pp. 6-7). That artisans generally proved to be more radical and active than industrial workers has been well documented by historians of European labor and revolutionary movements (E. Mendelsohn, "The Russian Jewish Labor Movement and Others," in Studies in Modem Jewish Social History, ed. Joshua A. Fishman [New York, 1972], pp. 91-92). 41 Rabochee delo, no. 1 (April 1, 1899): 85; Wildman, Making of a Workers' Revolution, p. 103; Istoriia ekaterinoslavskoi, pp. xx-xxi, 174; Listok rabotnika, no. 9-10 (November 1898): 15. 42 Soiuz russkikh sotsial'demokratov, Rabochee dvizhenu ν Ekatennoslave, p. 5.

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concluded, to the extent that the Social Democrats thought their actions had helped to instigate violent outbursts, in the Donbass-Dnepr Bend and elsewhere, the movement "must have occasionally felt that it had created a Frankenstein monster, a force quite alien to the ideals of the Marxist intelligentsia."43 While the Social Democratic party's influence on the mass of workers in Ekaterinoslav remained minimi, between 1898 and 1902 the party did dramatically increase in importance and size and succeeded in organizing street demonstrations.44 Ekaterinoslav's Social Democrats not only became charter members of the Russian Social Democratic Labor party (RSDRP), they were responsible for proposing the First Party Congress, which met secretly in a simple one-story house in Minsk in 1898. 45 In January 1899, Ekaterinoslav's Social Democrats issued the first leaflet that proudly displayed the new parry seal. A year later, Ekaterinoslav superseded Kiev as the most important SD center in southern Russia when a group of Jewish intelligent)1 published the first issue ofIuzhnyi rabocbii (Southern Worker), which proved to be a serious competitor to Iskra (Spark) as the party's leading organ.46 The political police, a Bund correspondent, and a local SD activist all estimated that by 1903 membership in Ekaterinoslav's Social Democratic party had grown to eight hundred people. Another two hundred members resided in the industrial suburb of Amur.47 The success Social Democrats achieved in recruiting both Great Russian industrial workers and Jewish artisans, despite the tensions between them, was partly due to their isolation from one another. The Social Democrats' organizational method and residential patterns in industrial towns kept the two groups separate. The Social Democrats organized propaganda groups by district, so that kruzhki usually did not bring together workers residing in the industrial districts or suburbs with artisans, who generally resided in the center of town. In addition, kruzhki composed of Jewish artisans genMendelsohn, Class Struggle, p. 104. By the last years of the century, tw o hundred members participated in a total of twentyfive kruzhki in Ekaterinoslav (Istorua ekatennaslavskot, p. jocvi) 45 Novopolin. "Iz istoru rabochego dvizheniia," p. 23. 40 Soiuz russkikh sotsiaTdemokratov. Rabochee dnzhenie v Eharrmoslavc. p. xxvii. Lenin w as so jealous of Iskra %regionalcompetitor that he ordered his local agents to "penetrate" and "undermine" it One might even wonder whether it was merely fortuitous that Iuzhnyi rabocbu'i editors were later arrested after the police followed I. Kh. Lalaiants from Lenin to the Iuzhnyi rabochu press since Irtna-ites replaced Iuzhnyi rabodms arrested editors. See Elwood. Russian Social Democracy, p. 13; Wildman, Making of a Workers' Revolution, pp. 222— 240; 2nd Istorua ekatenncslavskoi, pp. xxvi. xxix. 4~ TsGAOR. DP OO. f. 102. 1905. d. 1800, ch. 2 (Okhrana report, November 11, 1905), p. 5; Paslednua ctsm. no. 249 (September 18. 1905): 9; I. B. Polonskii, "Vospominaniia," Istorua ckxtcrmoslarskm, p. 360. 43 44

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erally met on Saturdays, while industrial workers met on Sundays.48 Where ethnic intermingling commonly did occur was in Great Russian worker kruzhki led by Jewish intelligenty. Ekaterinoslav Social Democrats helped create Social Democratic groups elsewhere in the Donbass-Dnepr Bend. In the late 1890s, the party orga­ nization in Ekaterinoslav, as well as those in Kharkov and Rostov, began to organize in the Donets Basin. Many party members believed that the time was finally ripe to begin seriously trying to organize the miners and steelworkers outside Ekaterinoslav. Until then, the Social Democratic movement had never secured more than a foothold in the Donets Basin. In contrast to Ekaterinoslav, the radical groups that existed in Donets Ba­ sin towns during the 1890s were mainly tiny groups of intelligenty—for example, from among the white-collar staffs at the railroad stations—who gathered to discuss theoretical issues and radical literature.49 Such kruzhki were isolated, with little or no contact with one another or with workers. Occasionally the arrival of an underground newspaper with reports on ac­ tivities elsewhere lessened somewhat their isolation and fortified their sense of participating in a growing movement. Agitational leaflets usually reached workers only when circulating activists happened to pass through the Donets Basin. Yet when the call went out in 1898 to spread social-democratic propa­ ganda to the mines and factories of the Donets Basin, activists such as N. Zelikman, a member of the Don committee in Rostov, became wildly optimistic: Our hearts and minds were seized with big plans to flood the mines with leaflets and literature and awaken the masses from their somnolence, and then to orga­ nize mass meetings and study groups and thereby forge a powerful union of factory workers and miners, creating support for the Petersburg and Moscow labor movements and unifying Donets workers into one powerful, threatening, southern proletarian group, extending from the walls of Rostov to Lugansk and Ekaterinoslav.50

Reality quickly deflated such grandiose dreams. Activists soon complained again that "the workers are benighted and move too often from place to place ... [so that] to establish even a simple organization is inconceiv­ able."S1 As difficult as it was to organize workers in Ekaterinoslav, it proved to be much more difficult in the steel towns and especially in the mining communities of the Donets Basin. Social Democratic party organizations in the Donets Basin did slowly Riibocbee dvtzhente ν Rossii ν XlX veke, vol. 4, pt. 1:164. Kharcchko, "Sotsial-demokraticheskii soiuz," p. 15. 50 Ibid., p. 16. 51 Levus, "Iz istorii," p. 60.

48

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grow after 1898, and by 1901 kruzhki existed in most of the large factory towns and in some of the larger mining communities. Many of these kruzhki considered themselves social democratic, but often that meant lit­ tle. As in Ekaterinoslav, many kruzhki, such as the one in the mining setdement of Shcherbinovsk, were concerned more with simply educating the miners than with political propaganda.52 In addition, a particularly acute shortage of leaflets and revolutionary literature in the Donets Basin hin­ dered radicals intent on agitating workers. Social-democratic groups in the mining settlements generally were smaller and less active than groups in the Donets Basin's steel towns. Most mining settlements suffered chronically from the absence of a radical intel­ ligentsia, although some radical engineers and doctors and some student interns from the St. Petersburg Mining Institute provided leadership and wrote leaflets. But even the few experienced organizers active in the Donets Basin generally found it extraordinarily difficult to make inroads among workers in pit villages. A. Shestakov, an enthusiastic young veteran of the underground, managed to get hired as a clerk at the Chulkovskii mine out­ side Iuzovka. But despite the seemingly intolerable conditions there, his determined efforts succeeded in establishing only one good contact with a miner. A mining accident could temporarily arouse the miners' ire, but Shestakov discovered the Chulkovskii work force to be a hard-drinking lot with no interest in reading or politics. Shestakov could chat politics with Nikita, his sole contact, and the friends that often accompanied Nikita, but Shestakov always found it necessary "to hold back. To hand out literature in such conditions was ticklish. It was necessary to come up with some other way."53 Before long, Shestakov conceded defeat and returned to Iu­ zovka. There he enjoyed success organizing Jewish artisans, who were more literate and politically aware. In Iuzovka and Lugansk, Social Democratic kruzhki began distributing leaflets in 1901, and formal party organizations were set up in both of these steel towns in 1902. As in the case of Ekaterinoslav, the activism in Iuzovka and Lugansk can be explained largely by the sizable Jewish and artisanal populations and the greater number of intelligenty present there. In Iuzovka, the Social Democratic party organization at first consisted "almost entirely of Jews," according to the memoirs of T. Kharechko.54 Factory workers were more active in Lugansk, but the hostility between Ukrainian and Great Russian workers posed an especially serious obstacle for Social Democrats trying to recruit Ukrainian workers. One Soviet his­ torian, I. Berkhin, acknowledged that "the well-known estrangement beKharechko, "Sotsial-demokraticheskii soiuz," pp. 19-20. Shestakov, "Na zare," p. 160. 54 "Sotsial-demokraticheskii soiuz," p. 19. See also Shestakov, "Na zare," p. 159. 52

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tween migrant and local workers, which the factory administrations and police authorities did their best to inflame, hampered the unification of workers and created difficult conditions for underground work . . . espe­ cially since the first propagandists and agitators and the most active partic­ ipants in circles were visiting Russian workers."55 Undeterred, in January 1902 the party committees in Iuzovka and Lu­ gansk, with support from Ekaterinoslav and Rostov, organized an um­ brella organization to unite all the Social Democratic groups active in the Donets Basin. During 1903 the Social Democratic Mining and Metal Workers Union changed its name to the Donets Union of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party and established connections with local groups in almost every sizable industrial town in the Donets Basin, to include a total of thirty circles and five hundred intelligent and workerintelligent members.56 By the standards of provincial SD organizations elsewhere in Russia, the Donets Union was "an unusually successful undertaking."57 The Donets Union tried to overcome the isolation of the pit villages by giving individual activists in Iuzovka and Lugansk personal responsibility for some mines.58 During the first one and a half years of its existence, members of the Donets Union distributed in nighttime "excur­ sions" a large amount of radical literature to workers in the Donets Basin: 63,000 copies of thirteen leaflets that the Union itself had composed and printed; 3,000 leaflets by member organizations; and 15,500 leaflets from the Ekaterinoslav and Rostov party organizations. The "letters," as the miners called the leaflets, often created a stir, but the Social Democrats repeatedly complained that miners completely misunderstood their mes­ sage. Just as had happened earlier in 1898 when the Social Democrats in Ekaterinoslav first began distributing leaflets on a large scale, workers in the Donets Basin interpreted the leaflets as calls to riot, even after the Do­ nets Union issued a special leaflet explaining the futility of rioting and the harm to the labor movement caused by earlier Donbass-Dnepr Bend ri­ ots.59 But in contrast to the situation in Ekaterinoslav in 1898, when the Briansk bunt followed the first mass distribution of the leaflets, no major disturbance erupted following the beginning of the SD's propaganda and agitation campaign in the Donets Basin. Lngamkaia bol'shevistskaia organtzatsita, p. 14. no. 45 (August 1, 1903): 8; Kirzncr, Gornorabochie, pp. 20-21; I. Moshinskii, "K voprosu ο s.-d. (Donetskom) soiuze gomozavodskikh rabochikh," ProUtarskaia revoltutsiia, no. 65 (1927): 233. 57 Wildman, Making